PREFACES 



PREFACES 



BY 

DON MARQUIS 

AUTHOR OF "HERMIONE," ETC. 




DECORATIONS BY 
TONI SARG 



D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

NEW YORK LONDON 

1919 









K^ 



COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT. I918, BY 
THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBUSHING ASSOCTATIOW 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

JUN 25 l-Jiif 



TO 

MY SISTERS 

MINERVA VIRGINIA MARQUIS 

AND 

BERNICE MAUDE MARQUIS 

THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY 
DEDICATED 



CONTENTS 

Preface to a Book of Literary Reminis- 
cences 

Preface to a Cook Book 

Preface to a Book of Fishhooks 

Preface to a Book of Cigarette Papers 

Preface to the Plays of Euripides . 

Preface to a Cat Show Catalogue . 

Preface to the Prospectus of a Club . 

Preface to a Medium's Dope Book . 

Preface to a Treatise on a New Art . 

Preface to a Memorandum Book 

Preface to a Hangman's Diary . 

Preface to a Volume of Poetry . 

Preface to Old Doctor Gumph's Almanac 

Preface to a Book of Paragraphs . 

Preface to a Book of Patterns . 

Preface to the Works of Billy Sunday 

Preface to a Calendar 

vii 



3 

13 
23 
39 
47 
S7 
63 
73 
81 

91 
103 
III 
121 

129 
T^37 
145 
153 



Contents 



Preface to a Study of the Current Stage i6i 

Preface to a Book of Safety Pins . . . 167 

Preface to the Novels of Harold Bell 

Wright 175 

Preface to a Book of Statistics . . . 183 

Preface to a Moral Book of Arithmetic . 193 

Preface to a Book Withheld .... 203 

Preface to Hoyt's Rules 213 

Preface to the Diary of a Failure . . 221 

Foreword to a Literary Censor^s Auto- 
biography 229 

Note to a Chapter on Journalism . . . 239 

Foreword to a Miser's Autobiography . . 247 

Preface to a Check Book 255 

Preface to the Autobiography of an Old- 

Fashioned Anarchist 263 

Preface to an Unpublished Volume . . 271 

Preface to a Book of Prefaces .... 281 



Preface to a Book of Literary 
Reminiscences 




Treface to a Book Oj Literary 
Reminiscences 

They are tearing the old chop house down — 
the Eheu Fugaces chop house — ^to build on its 
site a commercial enterprise, a sordid publishing 
house. ... So passes another literary land- 
mark; mere business triumphs again over the 
Arts. 

It was in 1850 that Jack Whittier first 
brought me in to dinner there. Jolly Jack Whit- 
tier! There was a wit and a true Bohemian 
for you I His quickness at a repartee was mar- 
velous. Mike Cervantes was drinking in the 
bar as we passed through. 

**Hello, Jack," hiccoughed Mike, *'been snow- 
bounding lately?" 

3 



Prefaces 



*'No," said Whittler, with a sidelong look at 
Mike's glass, ''nor skating either." 

"Ralphie Emerson has more humor," OUie 
Holmes used to say, "but, after all, Whittier is 
wittier!" 

Eheu Fugaces, the proprietor, had a flavor 
of his own. *'Wines aren't what they were," 
he was forever saying. *'Nor Bourbons either," 
he added one day, glancing at Hal Bourbon, 
afterward King of France as Henri Quatre, but 
just then in exile and down on his luck. 

Bourbon was a lean fellow and rather black- 
guardly; he used to sit all day when he had had 
a bit of good fortune eating buckwheat cakes 
soaked in olive oil and molasses, with caraway 
seeds sprinkled over them. . . . "Georgie," 
he would say to our favorite waiter, George 
Moore, "I miss something in you that I feel 
you should have, but I am not sure just what 
it is. Could it be pimples?" 

Georgie Moore was forever trying to write ; 
he used to hang about the tables and listen when 
the grown men told racy stories and would 
spend his leisure time writing them down as if 

4 



Preface to a Book of Literary Reminiscences 

he himself had been the hero of them. I never 
heard him say anything but *^Chacun a son 
goutP* except once, and then, seeing Frankle 
Bret Harte about to fall to hungrily upon an 
Irish stew into which Georgie himself had slyly 
slipped a cockroach, he varied it with ^^Chacun 
a son ragout F* 

Eheu Fugaces' place was the home of the 
jeu de mot. , , . "Disraeli,'* said Walt Whit- 
man one afternoon as we were sipping our 
toddies, "your wit makes me positively giddy I" 
**Me, too," said Beaconsfield, "it's my wit that 
makes me Dizzy 1" And then he added, after 
reflecting for only a moment or two, "Walt, 
I am a jeu de mot^ 

How New York changes I In those days the 
Battery was far uptown, and as for Bowling 
Green — well. Bowling Green was in Yon- 
kers. ... It was Felicia Hemans, I think, who 
created a sensation one evening by asking N. P. 
Willis — (or maybe it was Nat Wills; it was 
either Nat Wills or Nat Willis) — "What is a 
Yonker?" . . . The mot, however, has beea 
attributed to Jane Taylor, who used often to 

5 



Prefaces 



come to dinner with Jane Austen and Fenimore 
Cooper. 

The Two Janes, we called them. Dear 
Janes I I wonder if there is another man alive 
who remembers the night Jane Taylor and 
Jane Austen recited in unison ''The Face on the 
Barroom Floor" while Nero played chords on 
his ukelele? . . . Eheu Fugaces, the pro- 
prietor, used to say, "The new Janes aren*t 
what the old Janes were!" 

Shakespeare was tending bar In the place at 
the time, but he was never quite one of us. 
Eddie Poe would snort and remark: "Shake- 
speare I He is self-consciously imitating what 
John Masefield did because Masefield needed 
a job, that is what he is doing! Deliberately 
and affectedly pseudojohnmasefielding!" I 
think we all felt a little that way about him — 
that he was there to study the place and pick 
up local color, in his sharp way, with an eye to 
using it later. But Colley Gibber took him up, 
and later the Frohmans patronized the man, and 
I hear that he is finally on his way toward real 
success and a try-out in the movies. His verse 

6 



Preface to a Book of Literary Reminiscences 

was always a little too dressy for my liking; 
but, as Georgle Moore liked to murmur: 
^^Chacun a son goutF* 

Ah ! the gay parties I The old days I The 
present generation does not know what Bo- 
hemia was! There are certain mechanical 
imitators, and imitations — but the esprit, 
VHhtrt IS V esprit? Where is Bohemia? Where, 
for that matter, is l^ empire des lettresf Where? 
It is enough to make les larmes-aux yeuxf . . . 
At that time there were fish in the Aquarium, 
just as there are to-day — but, naturally, fish 
with a difference. Roaring Hank Longfellow 
and I, one night, coming in rather elevated, 
I must confess, after a gay party in Bushwick 
(now a part of Brooklyn), where Felicia He- 
mans had recited some of her own poems, as 
well as "Lasca" and "Curfew Shall Not Ring 
To-night!" — Hank and I somewhat boister- 
ously demanded grilki goldfish of old Eheu 
Fugaces. Eheu referred us in his ironical way 
to the Aquarium. "Well," cried Hank Long- 
fellow, who fairly bubbled w'ith wit at all 
times, "there's as good fish in the Aquarium 

7 



Prefaces 



as have ever been caught!'* ^'There's no such 
thing," said Eheu Fugaces. *'Fish aren't what 
they were in Noah's day at all." 

But Hank and I were off. It must have been 
a very gay party in Bushwick, for we wound up 
at the Hippodrome instead of the Aquarium, 
and seined from a tank a young woman, whose 
name I forget — she was the Annette Keller- 
mann of that day — whom we brought back to 
Eheu's place with a demand that she be grilled 
at once. . . . "Let her be stewed!" shouted 
Wash Irving, wag that he was. 

Swinburne was there that evening; Theodore 
Watts-Dunton used to bring him in for a few 
minutes now and then, shackled, and let him 
have a cup of cambric tea through a straw. 
The straw was necessary, as Watts-Dunton 
kept him muzzled for fear he would suddenly 
begin declaiming some of his own more sensu- 
ous poetry, and the shackles were to prevent 
him writing. When Jane Taylor, Jane Austen, 
Millard Fillmore and the young woman from 
the Hippodrome tank flung themselves into an 
impromptu dance — the Two Janes displaying 

8 



Preface to a Book of Literary Reminiscences 

a quarter of an inch of comelv, clocked stocking 
beneath their flowing pantalettes — Swinburne 
became excited and began to jingle his shackles. 
But Teddy Watts-Dunton dragged the old 
gentleman away, screaming and pulling back 
against his chain, and passionately trampling 
the cup which had contained the cambric tea. 

Queen Victoria I never saw at Eheu's chop 
house, but Gladstone and Lincoln, both always 
wearing neatly polished boots, and both with 
heavy gold watch chains with seals dangling 
from them, often dropped in arm in arm. 

I remember Lincoln regarding little Billy- 
Cul Bryant quizzically as Billy sat in the upper 
part of the icebox, unconsciously crushing a 
consignment of ripe tomatoes, writing "Than- 
atopsis." "Read it aloud, Billy-Cul," said 
Abie. And when Billy-Cul had done so Abie 
remarked humorously: *'It's got some awful 
good words in it, "Billy-Cul, but what's it all 
about?" 

But this was only affectation on Abie's part; 
he really liked "Thanatopsis," and had caught 
the drift of it at once; when he thought Glad- 

9 



Prefaces 



stone was not looking he allowed his face to 
become very sad and furrowed again and 
fumbled with his seals and wiped away a 
tear. . . . 

The dear old icebox! That, too, will be 
dismantled, I suppose, or scalded out, at least, 
and the zinc lining will lose its patina — that 
patina of which Geordie Moore used to say, 
as he ran his critical thumb nail over it, *'Chacun 
a son goutP' . . . Eheu Fugaces and his merry 
crew. ... I knew them well! I knew them 
When I 



Preface to a Cook Book 




Preface to a Cook Book 

An elderly gentleman who found me a bore 
once asked me desperately, "Are you fond of 
literature?" 

**I dote upon it," I said. 

He was a painter; we had met at a kind of 
tea where every one was talking of art and 
literature and things like that; we hated each 
other at once because each had been told that 
the other was interesting. 

"Oh, you dote on it I" he said, after a moment 
of venomous silence. 

"I do !" I replied firmly. 

He sneered; it was evident that he wished me 
to understand that he was incredulous. 

"Sir," I said, striving with all the rancor of 
my nature to be offensive, "sir, are 'jou fond of 
literature?" 

13 



Prefaces 



"I am," he said, putting on a pair of eye- 
glasses, and looking as if he might look like 
Whistler if he thought me worth wasting the 
look on. 

"What sort of literature are you fond of?" 
I asked. 

"I am fond of Lord Tennyson's Poems," he 
retorted insultingly. 

I permitted myself a faint, superior smile. 
It maddened him, as I intended it should; his 
nose turned a whitish blue as the blood receded 
from his face. 

"Did you ever read any of Meredith?" I 
asked. 

"I did!" he replied. 

I turned toward the fireplace, as if willing to 
veil a doubt. 

He took off his glasses; he pointed at me a 
long, bony digit that trembled with anger. 

''Uidyour 

"Yes," I said. 

"What?" he demanded. 

"For one thing," I told him, " The Egoist.' " 

I dwelt upon The Egoist as if I tasted a 
14 



Preface to a Cook Book 



subtle, ulterior jest In mentioning It to him. 
I hoped that would puzzle him. 

"One of Meredith's lesser known pieces, no 
doubt," he said. 

"Oh, no r' I affirmed. 

"Not so well known as *LucIle,' *' he asserted. 

"Xuclle'?" 

"What — you do not mean that you have 
never read Owen Meredith's masterpiece, 
XucUeM" 

"Owen I*' I gasped; but before I could do 
more than gasp he quoted : 

" *We may live without poetry, music or art, 
We may live without conscience, and live with" 

out heart, 
We may live without friends, we may live with^ 

out books; 
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.* *' 

The next instant our hostess was upon us, 
murmuring with a bright, arch smile: "Ah! 
Locksley Hall I Those old Victorian things 
were wonderful in their way, after all . . . 
were they not? I knew you two dear men 

16 



Prefaces 



would be just simply wild about each other I" 
. . . She was that sort of hostess. 

Those lines were printed In blue and gold, 
with a red border around them, in the front of 
a Cook Book that was one of my grandmother's 
wedding presents. Above them was the pic- 
ture of an ample and dimpled young woman In 
a white apron, who was smiling and mixing 
something in a bowl. I cannot remember the 
time when I was not aware that this young 
woman's name was Dorcas. No one ever told 
me that her name was Dorcas, but the knowl^ 
edge somehow came to me while I was still 
in kilts, and It is as Dorcas that I think of her 
to this day. 

One glanced at her and knew at once the sort 
of things that Dorcas would cook, that Dorcas 
was born to cook. Never, in later life, have I 
sat down to dinner without saying to myself, 
"Ah! things look Dorcassy to-night 1" or, 
*'Alas I there Is nothing Dorcassy here." 

Do not mistake me ; my affection for Dorcas 
was (and is) based upon nothing so simple as 
her air of bucolic wholesomeness. I am no ad- 
16 



Preface to a Cook Booh 



vocate of plain cooking. Dorcas was not a 
Plain Cook. She was the mistress of seven hun- 
dred complications, and in them she rejoiced. 
If there was an apparent simplicity In the re- 
sult, that appearance proceeded from the ex- 
cellent art of Dorcas which subdued many in- 
gredients to a delicious unison. For she was 
an artist. 

But she was not a scientist. Dorcas had 
never studied culinary chemistry. If you had 
tried to talk seriously to Dorcas about her gas- 
tric juices she would have been as shocked as 
If you had mentioned her legs. Dorcas cooked 
for the sight and smell and soul and palate of 
Man; his digestion did the best It could. She 
betrayed Man's duodenum, and he loved her 
for it. 

And suppose the richness of Dorcas did ruin 
one's digestion. What then? Is the digestion 
a god that we should regard It reverently? To 
my mind there Is something base In considering 
one's digestion as If It were one of the higher 
attributes. I like to see a reckless, adventurous, 
headstrong, romantic, dashing sort of eater. I 

IT 



Prefaces 



like the vaunting spirit that proclaims, *'By 
heaven, I will conquer that plum pudding or 
die!" 

Let us be sensible about this thing. . . . An 
Average Man may eat the Dorcas Cooking 
from infancy on to the age of forty years be- 
fore he becomes an Incurable dyspeptic. Sup- 
pose, then, he must retire to poached eggs and 
malted milk — what memories he has to look 
back upon I 

I once had a second cousin, a prudent boy, 
who thought a great deal of his digestion; Dor- 
cas could not tempt him ; he knew all about his 
alimentary canal and gave himself as many 
airs as a bumptious young anchorite who has 
just donned his first hair shirt. He exasper- 
ated me; if he had been deliberately saving 
his digestion for the first thirty-five years of 
life In order to enjoy It to the full and with 
more mature discrimination during the latter 
thirty-five I could have understood him. But 
no — he intended to eat poached eggs and malted 
milk to the frugal end. 

But the universe is not on the side of frugal- 
18 



Preface to a Cook Book 



ity; the stars were hurled broadcast from the 
hand of a spendthrift God. . . . Cousin Tom, 
going back to his office after a lunch of oatmeal 
crackers on his twenty-eighth birthday, was 
killed by a brick which fell from the chimney 
of a chop house in which I sat eating a steak 
en casserole with mushrooms and thinking sen- 
timentally of Dorcas. He died without issue, 
and carried his gastric juices unimpaired to the 
grave. In a way I took a certain satisfaction 
in his death, as it proved the folly of prudence; 
and yet I wept at the funeral, for the thought 
struck me, "What could I not do with Tom's 
practically virgin digestive organs if he had but 
contrived to leave them to me!" 

There was a stomach that had never really 
lived . . . and now it never would I 

It is better to go swaggering through the 
gates of life loose-lipped and genial and greedy, 
embracing pleasures and suffering pains, than 
to find one's self, in the midst of caution, in- 
continently slain by chance and eaten by worms. 



Preface to a Book of Fishhooks 




Preface to a Booh of Fishhooks 

This little book of flies and hooks and guts 
and hackles, which was presented to us by a 
friend who heard us say we liked to go fishing 
— we may as well admit at once that It Is full 
of riddles we cannot rede. We know nothing 
about trout, and have no great ambition to 
learn. Fishing for trout has too much exer- 
tion and bodily effort about it to be attractive. 
One tramps about over rough country and gets 
one's self wet In cold water, and tangles one's 
hook In one's hair and ears, and all that sort 
of thing. 

Our Idea of fishing Is to put all the exertion 
up to the fish. If they are ambitious we will 
catch them. If they are not, let them go about 
their business. If a fish expects to be caught 
by us he has to look alive. We give him his 



Prefaces 



opportunity, and he must make the most of it. 

Most of our fishing, and the only fishing we 
ever really enjoyed, was done with a worm, a 
hook, a leaden sinker, a line and a willow pole. 
We wouldn't know what to do with a reel. We 
expect a fish to eat the hook very thoroughly, 
to persist until he gets it well down and then 
to signal us that all is well by pulling the float 
under water; a reel is superfluous; o;ie flips 
the pole over one's head and the fish lands 
somewhere in the bushes behind. 

A little quiet river or a creek, with low banks 
and plenty of big trees along the banks, is the 
only place to fish ; and the fish should be mostly 
bullheads. Bullheads know their business; they 
hook themselves more completely and compe- 
tently than any other fish. A bullhead will 
swallow the worm, the hook, and the lead 
sinker, a part of the line, and then grumble be- 
cause he hasn't been able to eat the float and 
the pole. And you can leave it all up to him. 
You can sit in the shade and watch the float 
bobbing and jerking about in the serene con- 
sciousness that he will do a good job. When 



Preface to a Book of Fishhooks 

he pulls the pole Itself out of the socket of 
earth into which you have jabbed the butt end 
of it, then is the time to interfere and bring 
him to land. Don't hold the pole yourself; it 
is too much trouble. 

Being out of the water doesn't make much 
difference to the average bullhead. We don't 
suppose he could stand it more than two or 
three days, unless there was a damp wind blow- 
ing, but a few hours more or less are nothing 
to him. After having eaten as much of your 
fishing tackle as you will permit him to have 
before interfering, you might think that he 
would be a little dejected. But not so. You 
go to take the hook out of him, and he rushes 
at you and horns you, with a queer purring 
noise, and shows every disposition to fight it 
out on land. 

And he seldom knows when he is dead. Of- 
ten in the course of a day we have caught a 
bushel or so of bullheads and thrown them into 
the back of the buggy and driven home with 
them, five or six miles, maybe. Arrived at 
home we would find them stiff and caked with 

25 



Prefaces 



dried mud and dust, and to all appearances 
dead, having been out of the water and jog- 
ging along in the hot afternoon sun for a couple 
of hours. But throw them into a barrel of 
water, and in a few minutes they were swimming 
around as if nothing had happened, grinning 
over the top of the barrel and begging for 
more worms and hooks and lead sinkers. Re- 
freshed by his cool plunge, the beast was ready 
for another romp. The bullhead is not a beau- 
tiful fish, and has no claims to aristocracy, but 
he is enduring. 

We never liked to fish from a boat. You 
have to row the thing about, and that is a lot 
of trouble. Select a big, shady tree that bends 
over a pool in some little inland stream and 
lie down under the tree, and lie there all day 
and fish and eat and smoke and chew tobacco 
and watch the dragonflies and spit into the 
water. If you feel like swimming a little, all 
right — it doesn't particularly bother the bull- 
heads. But it is a mistake to go to sleep. 

If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how 
are you going to know you are loafing? And 
26 



Preface to a Book of Fishhooks 

if you don't know It, what satisfaction is there 
in it? And it Is also a mistake to think too 
deeply. If you do that, about the time you 
begin to get on the track of the secret of the 
universe some fool fish will hook himself, and 
you will have to attend to him. 

Lie with your hat over your face and watch 
thoughts carefully from under the brim of It 
as they come toward you out of the woods or 
up the creek. And if a thought that seems as 
If it were going to be too profound or trouble- 
some tries to crawl up on you shoo it away and 
wait for an easy thought. And when you get an 
easy thought hold on to it and think it for a 
long time and enjoy it. 

The best thoughts to have when you are fish- 
ing are the thoughts about what you would do 
if you had a million dollars. After a while you 
get sort of lenient toward the world, and un- 
ambitious, and think it's a little selfish of you 
to want a whole million, and say "Shucks ! I'd 
be willing to take a hundred thousand!" And 
you think maybe If you roused up a little and 
looked over the edge of the bank you would 

27 



Prefaces 



see a streak of gold In the soil, and then you 
would go and buy that land of the farmer that 
owns It and get rich off of the gold. And then 
you remember that you don^t know who owns 
the land and It would be considerable trouble 
to have to ask questions around and find out. 
So It doesn't seem worth while to look over the 
edge of the bank and see whether the gold Is 
there after all. And, anyhow, would It be fair, 
to whatever farmer owns the land, to buy It 
knowing there was gold on It and never tell 
him? And what would you buy It with? If 
you borrowed money to buy It with the fellow 
you borrowed the money from would likely get 
the biggest part of It, and you would have all 
your work and worry for nothing, and so you 
don't look to see If the gold Is there. And 
then you get to thinking that probably there 
aren't many people honest enough to pass up a 
fortune like that just simply because somebody 
else owns It and you admire yourself for being 
that honest. 

You can find more things to admire yourself 
for, lying around fishing like that, If you pick 
^8 



Preface to a Booh of Fishhooks 

your thoughts properly. Everybody ought to 
do it all the time and not work at anything else. 
• ••••••••• 

Several friends and literary advisers to whom 
we have shown the foregoing preface have taken 
the trouble to intimate that they do not be- 
lieve what we have said concerning the fish 
known as the bullhead; namely, that he can live 
out of water for several hours. This only 
shows how little some people know about bull- 
heads. We might have told a story of a par- 
ticular bullhead far more incredible, and equally 
true, but that we are aware of this general lack 
of exact information concerning bullheads and 
did not care to have our statements questioned 
by the ignorant. 

This particular bullhead we caught and 
tamed when we were about twelve years old, 
and named him Mr. Hoskins because of his 
facial resemblance to a neighbor. Mr. Hos- 
kins — not the fish, but the fish's godfather — 
had fallen from a windmill in youth, upon his 
head, and his head had been getting larger ever 
since, until he seemed all head, with a few 
29 



Prefaces 



wiry spikes of beard and mustache around his 
mouth. His intellect had not grown as his 
head grew; the poor man used to go about call- 
ing attention to his large head, saying: ''I fell 
off a windmill and the hogs ate me, all but my 
head — see my head!" He was pathetically 
proud of it. The fish looked like him, and with 
the heedless cruelty of boyhood we named the 
bullhead Mr. Hoskins. 

Mr. Hoskins (the fish) dwelt in an old wash 
boiler under a maple tree. And it was be- 
neath this maple tree that we used to feed all 
our other animals every morning — a black dog, 
a crow, a black and orange cat, a brown dog 
called Gustavus Adolphus after the Terrible 
Swede of that name and an owl known (for we 
had been reading Dumas) as the Duchess de 
Montpensier. At that time, and in that place, 
the village butcher would give one a whole 
basketful of scraps and bones for a dime; the 
dogs, the cat, the crow and the Duchess would 
range themselves, solemnly expectant, in a row 
under the maple tree and catch the bits of meat 
we tossed to them in their mouths or beaks, 
30 



Preface to a Book of Fishhooks 

no animal stepping out of his or her place in 
line and no animal offering to bite or peck its 
neighbor. 

Mr. HoskinSj the bullhead, would come to 
the surface of the water and peer with one eye 
over the rim of the boiler, watching these pro- 
ceedings closely. At first he watched them 
grouchily, we thought. A bullhead, however, 
Is somewhat handicapped in the expression of 
the lighter and gayer emotions; his face Is so 
constructed that even if he feels otherwise than 
gloomy and Ill-humored he cannot show It. But 
as the spring wore into summer It seemed to us 
that Mr. Hoskins was getting friendlier, some- 
how. One day we tossed him a piece of meat 
and he snapped at It. After that we ranged 
the other beasts In a circle around the wash, 
boiler, and if Gustavus Adolphus or the Duchess 
de Montpensier missed a piece of meat It fell 
to Mr. Hoskins. In ten days Mr. Hoskins 
could catch as well as any of them. 

One morning we were alarmed to see that 
Mr. Hoskins's boiler had been overturned dur- 
ing the night, no doubt by some thirsty cow. He 
SI 



Prefaces 



seemed dead when we picked him up and we 
dug a hole in the ground and threw him into 
it. But before we had him covered a sudden 
summer rain came up and we sought shelter. 
It was a drenching rain; when it was over, 
a couple of hours later, we returned to Mr. 
Hoskins to find the hole filled with water and 
him flopping around in it. He was evidently- 
feeling quite chipper, and was contentedly eat- 
ing an angleworm. 

We put him back in his boiler.* And then 
we began to experiment with Mr. Hoskins. 
If he could live out of water for two or 
three hours, why not for a whole day? Every 
morning we took him from his boiler at a cer- 
tain time, and each day we kept him from the 
water ten minutes or so longer than the day 
preceding. By September he was able to go 
from seven in the morning until eight in the 
evening entirely out of water without suffering 
any apparent ill effects except a slight loss in 
weight. At first during the hours when he was 

* The star marks the exact spot at which the more skep- 
tical sort of person will likely cease to believe. 



Preface to a Book of Fishhooks 

out of water he would seem rather torpid, in 
fact almost comatose. But by giving him fre- 
quent cool drinks from a bottle with a quill in 
it we found that he became livelier. By autumn 
he could go until sunset on not more than two 
drinks of water. 

He became a jollier companion, joining, so 
far as he was able, ourself and the other ani- 
mals in all our sports. One of the most pleas- 
ant recollections of our boyhood is the mem- 
ory of Mr. Hoskins flopping genially about the 
garden while Gustavus Adolphus and the other 
dog dug angleworms for Mr. Hoskins and the 
crow. 

When the chilly weather came in November 
we moved his wash boiler into the house and 
set it behind the kitchen range, as we did not 
care to run the risk of having him frozen. But 
with the cold weather his need for water grew 
less and less; he began to manifest something 
like pride in his ability to do without it; it was 
in January that he began to experience, or at 
least to affect, a repugnance toward being in 
water at all. Then we substituted for the boiler 

33 



Prefaces 



a box full of sawdust. Still, however, even dur- 
ing January he would sometimes awake during 
the night and cry for a drink, and we insisted on 
a weekly bath. 

At seven o'clock on the morning of St. Val- 
entine's Day, 1890, we went into the kitchen 
and found that Mr. Hoskins had leaped from 
the floor to the hearth of the kitchen range, and 
had succeeded in working himself in among the 
warm ashes. He had felt cold during the night. 
After that we always put him to bed with a 
hot water bottle, and we remember well his 
cries of peevishness and discomfort on the 
night when the stopper came out of the bottle 
and drenched him. 

We linger over these last days of February, 
hesitating to go on, because they were the last 
days in Mr. Hoskins's life. It was on Febru- 
ary 28 that he went out of doors for the first 
time that year. Some one had left the cistern 
uncovered and he fell in. We heard his cries. 
We put a ladder down and plucked him from 
the black water. But it was too late. If he 
had only remembered how to swim, if we had 



Preface to a Book of Fishhooks 

only had the presence of mind to fling down a 
plank to him he might have kept himself afloat 
until we reached him with the ladder. But It 
was too late. We suppose that when he felt 
himself in the water a panic struck him. Those 
were days before every family had a pulmotor. 
We worked over him, but It was no use. It Is 
silly perhaps to feel so badly over a little ani- 
mal like that, but from that day to this we 
have never eaten a bullhead. 



Preface to a Book of Cigarette 
Papers 




Preface to a Book of Cigarette Papers 



One of our youthful ambitions was to be able 
to sit astride a horse, governing his action with 
one hand while with the other we nonchalantly 
rolled a cigarette. We have never known but 
two people who could do it. One of them was 
employed by a show, and we always suspected 
that there was an understanding, a gentlemen's 
agreement, between the horse and him; per- 
haps he bribed the animal outright. The other 
was a genuine cowboy who had gone to the real 
West from the little middle western country 
town where we lived more than thirty years 
ago and who liked to come back "East" for a 
few weeks every two or three years and ex- 
39 



Prefaces 



hibit tricks of the sort before an admiring 
crowd of former friends and neighbors. His 
name was Buck Something-or-Other. 

No doubt among his fellow range riders a 
few hundred miles to the west Buck was com- 
monplace enough, but to our tame Illinois vil- 
lage, where nothing ever happened, Buck was 
a figure of romance. He was a being from 
another world, a link between the paper cov- 
ered novels which we read and real life. Per- 
haps he knew it and enjoyed being just that; 
he was a picturesque and facile liar; likely he 
read the paper covered novels too and was con- 
sciously striving to suggest their heroes — a thing 
he could get away with much more readily in 
Illinois than in the West, we suppose. 

At any rate it was from Buck that we gained 
our original impression that there was some- 
thing rather elegant and dashing and pictur- 
esque and knowing about the cigarette. We 
never did learn to roll them with one hand, 
either on a horse or off of one ; to this day it is 
all we can do to roll one that will hang to- 
gether, seated securely in an armchair and us- 
40 



Preface to a Booh of Cigarette Papers 

ing all our fingers and thumbs, and we have 
more thumbs than any one else we know when 
It comes to a business of that sort. 

The mind of youth is "wax to receive and 
marble to retain," as a friend of ours once 
quoted while observing a family of six children, 
all below the age of ten, being dragged through 
the horror chamber of the Eden Musee. And 
there still dwells within us the feeling that the 
rolled cigarette belongs of right to such Inter- 
esting creatures as adventurers and revolution- 
ists and poets. 

We had been a worshiper of Stevenson for 
some time before we learned that he was ad- 
dicted to them, and when we learned It the cir- 
cumstance naturally confirmed our feeling. Per- 
sonally we do not enjoy smoking them; we do 
not get any physical satisfaction out of them; 
this is due, no doubt, to the fact that we learned 
to smoke a corncob pipe crammed with the very 
rankest and blackest tobacco at an early age, 
and no cigarette means anything to us unless 
we chew it as a goat or a deer chews them. 

But it is the grosser and more material side 
41 



Prefaces 



of our nature which finds the cigarette too feeble 
and pallid; all that is romantic and literary and 
spiritual in us holds by the cigarette. When we 
die and are purged of all the heavy flesh that 
holds us down, our soul, we hope, will roll and 
smoke cigarettes along with Buck the Romantic 
and lying cowboy and Ariel and Stevenson 
and Benvenuto Cellini and Jack Hamlin. We 
have never been the person on earth we should 
like to be; circumstances have always tied us 
to the staid and commonplace and respectable; 
but when we become an angel we hope to be 
right devilish at times. And that is an idea 
that some one should work out — Hell as a place 
of reward for Purtians. But it is possible that 
that elderly Mephistopheles, with the smack of 
a canting Calvinistic archangel about him, Ber- 
nard Shaw, has already done so somewhere. 

Where the idea that the cigarette is more 
injurious than tobacco taken in any other form 
originated we cannot imagine. It seems to us, 
looking back and looking round on all the 
smokers we have known and know, to be gro- 
tesquely untrue. But we believed it firmly in 

42 



Preface to a Book of Cigarette Papers 

our youth; it added a spice of deviltry to the 
idea of cigarette smoking which made it ten 
times more attractive. We dare say that scores 
of thousands, and perhaps millions, of Amer- 
ican boys have taken to cigarette smoking sim- 
ply because they thought it more reckless than 
smoking cigars or pipes. The moralists man- 
aged to invest it for them with a mysterious 
tradition of depravity; and so, quite naturally, 
having arrived at a certain age, they took to 
it enthusiastically. It has probably been a good 
thing for them; it has kept them away from 
too much pipe and cigar smoking. If we had 
been encouraged by some farsighted elder re- 
lation to take to cigarettes at the age of ten we 
should not be the physically ruinous thing, the 
anemic, pipe-shattered wreck, that we are to- 
day. But, as we have said, the mild things give 
us no sensation unless we eat them; and now 
it is too late for us to reform and take them up. 



Preface to the Plays of 
Euripides 




Preface to the Plays of Euripides 

We approach a preface to the plays of Eurip- 
ides with more confidence than we could sum- 
mon to the critical consideration of any other 
Greek dramatist. We know more about Eurip- 
ides. We have read more of him. We once 
read five hnes of him in the original Greek. 
It is true that we did not know what they were 
about when we read them, and should not know 
now; but we read them thirty or forty times 
and something about the manner in which we 
read them saved a man's life. 

We were fussing around the ofEce of the At- 
lanta (Ga.) Journal one morning about three 
o'clock, having just finished writing an editorial 
which we thought would likely elect Hoke 

47 



Prefaces 



Smith governor, If he were able to live up to it, 
when we ran across a copy of "Iphigenia in 
Taurls." It was a new edition, and some trust- 
ing publisher had sent it along in the vain hope 
that it would be noticed. We happened to 
know the alphabet and could mispronounce a 
few words, and we turned over the pages wish- 
ing that we were able to read the thing — it 
might give us a chance to elevate our mind, 
which was suffering from the frightful strain of 
writing about Hoke Smith in such a way that 
even Hoke would believe himself a statesman. 
And thinking how great a man Euripides prob- 
ably was, for all we knew, and how superior to 
Hoke Smith he must have been in many ways, 
we got very hungry. 

We went across the street to a little basement 
lunchroom kept by a fellow named George Ste- 
fanopoulous, who always put so much onion in 
his Hamburger steaks one could not taste the 
beef. If one poured enough Worcestershire 
sauce over them so that one could not taste the 
onions they could be eaten. We carried Eu- 
ripides with us, and George told us proudly that 

48 



Preface to the Plays of Euripides 

there is no more difference between the Greek 
of Euripides and the Greek written and spoken 
in Athens to-day than between the English of 
Shakespeare's time and the EngHsh of to-day. 
Inquiry revealed that George's knowledge of 
Shakespeare was about as extensive as our 
knowledge of Euripides, and so we cannot vouch 
for his statement. 

Interrupting our course in Euripides — some 
one or some thing has been interrupting us all 
our life every time we seemed to be on the point 
of really getting Into the classics — in came a 
young man named Henry. 

Henry roomed with us, and roamed with us 
at that time, and he was a chronic sufferer from 
false angina pectoris. This Is a disease (un- 
known to Euripides, but Alcibiades undoubtedly 
developed it) which has all the effects upon pa- 
tient and observer of real organic affection of 
the heart; no one takes it lightly but the doc- 
tors. In Henry's case it was aggravated by a 
fondness for Georgia corn whisky and stuff he 
ate out of tin cans. This diet did things to his 
stomach; his stomach kicked to his pneumo- 
49 



Prefaces 



gastric nerve, and his pneumogastric nerve 
gripped his heart as with iron claws, squeezed 
it to the size of a peanut, twisted it like a foun- 
tain pen that won^t unscrew and convinced it 
that it would never beat again. The chief dif- 
ference between real angina and pseudo angina 
(as far as we can gather from Euripides) is 
that while both can kill you, the real sort kills 
you more quickly and kindly. 

Henry pulled a spasm of it while George 
was telling us about Euripides; writhed about, 
and fell to the floor semi-conscious. 

Heat, applied to the heart, and strychnine 
or aromatic ammonia, if you can get hold of 
them, are (as ^Esculapius would say) "indi- 
cated." 

So we ser^ George's assistant to telephone 
for a doctor and applied a hot Hamburger 
steak, just out of George's frying pan, to 
Henry's bosom. 

We had frequently helped Henry die with ■ 
his heart, but this time we were alarmed. 

"George," said we, "throw another Ham- 
burger steak into the skillet at once. His pulse 
50 



Preface to the Plays of Euripides 

has stopped entirely. And this steak is cool- 
ing." 

Just then Henry's eyes fluttered and he strove 
to speak. We bent over the sufferer. 

"I'm dying," murmured Henry. *TrayI 
Pray for me!" 

The request caught us unaware ; we could not 
remember any formal petition. In desperation 
we took up Euripides, and, as the second Ham- 
burger steak went hot and sizzling and drip- 
ping with grease from George's frying-pan to 
Henry's heart, we began to chant one of the 
choruses. 

There was something about a Basileon in it, 
whatever a Basileon may be . . . 

"Thank you!" muttered Henry . . . 

The third steak was getting cool, and still 
George's assistant did not return with a doctor. 
Henry's chest was cooling, too. His feet and 
hands were cold. He had no more pulse than 
a wooden Indian or one of the iron dogs in 
Hoke Smith's front yard. If we had known 
a real prayer we would have switched to it from 
Basileon . . . 

51 



Prefaces 



And just as we were putting Basileon over the 
jumps for the eighteenth time George Stefano- 
poulous announced: 

"Sir, I have no more Hamburger steak to 
fry!" 

"My God!" said we, ^'Basileon — Basileon — - 
dig up something else — Basileon — Basileon — 
fry an egg, George — Basileon — Basileon — and 
be quick about It ! Fry two eggs !" 

It was at the sixteenth egg that the physician 
arrived and complimented us on our treatment. 

"Heat," he said, "is the great thing in these 
cases, and it Is well to remove all apprehension 
from the patient's mind if possible." "The 
prayer," said Henry, who had been hypoder- 
micked into something like an appetite for corn 
whisky and tin cans again, "the prayer is what 
saved me!" 

Euripides did not live as long as Sophocles, 
but was, on the whole, more widely popular. 
And one has only to compare the "Iphigenia" 
of Euripides with the "Agamemnon" of 
iEschylus to see their entire dissimilarity. They 
are products of practically the same period of 
52 



Preface to the Plays of Euripides 

Hellenic culture . . . and yet, what a differ- 
ence! 

Henry married, Hoke Smith in the Senate, 
Euripides dead — how time flies I 



Preface to a Cat Show 
Catalogue 




Preface to a Gat Show Catalogue 

The feline animals described and pictured in 
this catalog are, doubtless, the aristocrats of 
their species. But I know a yellow cat, lean 
and wicked, and with the voice of a lost soul 
crying out its woes across some black abyss of 
nether night, who could whip any dozen of 
them. He has the courage of Ajax. 

For years I have been more or less bothered 
by the summer cat. He comes — he and she 
come — in earnest couples, in tragic trios, to 
stage desperate operas of war and love beneath 
my chamber window. I have flung old boots, 
electric light bulbs, Christmas presents, and 
corncob pipes at them, without effect. Sixteen 
volumes of the works of the English poefe, full 
of typographical errors and notes by pedantic 
gentlemen kindly interpreting the poets' mean- 

57 



Prefaces 



Ings better than they could themselves, went 
after the boots and pipes, but the felines al- 
ways returned. Once I thought I had perma- 
nently discouraged one with Wordsworth's 
^'Excursion," but he was back In forty-eight 
hours; he had only been hit by the book — he 
could not read it. 

About three months ago I had what I thought 
was a great idea. I bought an electric pocket- 
flasher, such as are carried by watchmen and 
stage burglars and the detectives created by 
popular illustrators of magazine stories. The 
next time the alley orchestra tuned up I flashed 
the light out of my window upon the musicians. 
They couldn't stand it. Cat after cat would 
catch it in his eyes, try to stare It down for a 
couple of minutes, and then suddenly turn and 
slink off. They love the darkness, for their 
ways are evil. 

But about three weeks ago the yellow demon 
mentioned above made his entrance into the | 
alley, and as he came he sang. He is a cat with 
a bitter melancholia, with a profound, pessimis- 
tic sense of the uselessness of existence; and his 

68 



Preface to a Cat Show Catalogue 

hatred of the cosmos which he is forced to in- 
habit is the motive of his song; he is a cat with 
a strong, black, bad, unbroken heart, who 
loathes life. 

I gave him the iiash in his eyes, and he 
stopped singing, startled. But did he run? Not 
he. He squatted and flattened his ears, and 
swished his tail. I moved the spot-light a couple 
of feet away from him; he studied it, and then 
he suddenly sprang at it, hissing and clawing; 
he arched his back and fought it as I made it 
dance about the court; he rushed it; he boxed 
it with his wicked claws extended; he snarled 
and fell back, baffled; but he always came on 
again. I got tired before he did, and went to 
bed and left him victorious. He was back two 
nights later, and fought the light again; he 
has been back four or five times. To him that 
ray of light, menacing him and leaping about 
him, is not only an enemy, but an enemy whose 
hostility must be inexplicable; it must shoot 
down into the blackness at him like a malign 
miracle. But his heart is stout. Whether the 
phenomenon is human or feline or demoniac, 

59 



Prefaces 



he is not to be daunted; he has the courage of 
Ajax. If he weighed fifty pounds instead of 
ten, he would decimate New York City — the 
Tammany pohcemen would not touch him, out 
of respect for the species — and become as much 
of a hero as one of America's popular mur- 
derers. 



Preface to the Prospectus of 
a Club 



Preface to the Prospectus of a Club 

Brooklyn is getting to be a devil of a place. 
They are organizing a club over there, and the 
name of it is to be La Boheme . . . just like 
that: La Boheme! With one of those rakish, 
foreign looking accents over the E. One of 
those sassy accents that make you think of Tril- 
by and the Latin Quarter and . . . and . . . 
oh, you know I All that sort of thing ! 

They have been having oyster fights at the 
church parsonages and elocutionary teas at the 
Pouch Gallery and hearing it hinted that they 
are staid and conservative, long enough, and 
now they are going to show they have some vie 
over there, if you get what we mean. Green- 
wich Village isn't the only place in Greater 
New York that can get away with this vie stuff. 
There has always been plenty of vie in Brook- 

63 



Prefaces 



lyn, but people In Manhattan and the Bronx 
have pretended not to believe it. 

People In Greenwich Village wouldn't act as 
if they owned all the esprit and verve and vie 
in the five boroughs if they only knew more 
about Brooklyn. 

Walt Whitman used to live over there 
and edit the Eagle and go swimming in But- 
termilk Channel, two points off the starboard 
bow of Hank Beecher's church. Once an old 
Long Island skipper sunk a harpoon into Walt's 
haunch when he came up to blow, and the poet, 
snorting and bellowing and spouting verse, 
towed the whaler and his vessel clear out to 
Montauk before he shook the Iron loose. Is 
there a bard in Greenwich Village that could 
do that? Not even Jack Reed, who writes like 
Byron and swims like Leander, could do that. 

Walt was a Brooklynlte ; Ben De Casseres 
was bom there; Newell Hillls and Jim Hune- 
ker and Laura Jean Libbey live there now, and 
we moved away ourself only a few months ago. 
And now that the vie over there Is getting more 
organized, and more Boheme-like, so to speak, 
64. 



Preface to the Prospectus of a Club 

we're going to move back when our present 
lease runs out. 

There have always been literati and vie in 
Brooklyn, if you know where to look for them. 
Ed Markham Is going over there and recite 
*The Man with the Hoe" when this La Boheme 
Club opens up, out on Washington avenue, half- 
way between the Pouch Gallery and the place 
where the Battle of Long Island was fought. 
And speaking of the Battle of Long Island, Mr. 
Higgins, the ink manufacturer, once offered a 
prize for the best piece of poetry about the 
Battle of Long Island, which gave quite an im- 
petus to the efforts of all of us younger Brook- 
lyn literati. The winning poem wasn't written 
in his brand of ink at all, but he was game and 
paid the prize just the same. If Mr. Higgins 
isn't asked to join this new La Boheme Club It 
will be a darned shame. 

Mr. Eugene V. Brewster — undoubtedly Eu- 
gene Vie Brewster — who is considerable litter* 
ateur himself, a patron of all the arts, and quite 
an authority on Boheme, both here and abroad, 
we understand, is starting this new La Boheme 

65 



Prefaces 



Club; and his own house on Washington ave- 
nue is to be the clubhouse. There's nothing of 
the short sport about Eugene Vie Brewster I 
To give you some idea, we quote Rule 5 of the 
House Rules from the prospectus: 

The freedom of the whole house is conceded to all 
guests and is desired by the host and hostess. The 
books in the library, the engravings in the dining room, 
the paintings in the salon, the photos in the hall, the 
pen and inks in the den, the piano, the pianola, the 
harp, the guitar, the curios, the portfolios — every- 
thing — are to be freely utilized. Please don't all con- 
gregate in one corner of one room. 

There's nothing takes the vie out of a Bo- 
heme party like everybody bunching together in 
one corner, or sitting around the walls not say- 
ing anything. They used to do that at spelling- 
bees back home when we were a kid, before 
the spelling actually started; and Julius Cham- 
bers, In his department in the Brooklyn Eagle, 
mentioned that he noticed a tendency toward 
the same thing at Windsor Palace when Queen 
Victoria was presented to him. E. Vie Brew- 
ster Is right to speak out plainly and firmly 
about that corner stuff at the start. 



Preface to the Prospectus of a Club 

We might as well give all the rest of the 
rules while we are about It: 

This organization shall have only one officer, a 
vice-president. It shall meet every now and then, 
but usually on Sunday, from five to eleven. There 
shall be no dues, no elections, no formalities, and no 
business. It shall have no constitution nor by-laws. 
Membership shall consist of attendance. Any per- 
son may call a meeting at any time or place and all 
may attend who are invited. Any person is eligible 
who can do something, or who has done something, 
in science, arms, letters or any of the arts. Members 
may dress as they please, but semi-formal dress is 
preferred. Every person attending must expect to 
be called upon at any meeting, without notice, to do 
his or her bit, and to do it — if convenient. Hence, 
please come prepared. The purpose of this organiza- 
tion shall be to promote social intercourse; to bring 
together agreeable people of talent; to encourage so- 
cial, political, domestic and national economy; to give 
receptions to distinguished people; to exchange ideas, 
sift them and make public the best ones; lastly, but 
not leastly, to encourage early hours — early hours for 
retiring and rising, and hence early hours for begin- 
ning and ending all evening entertainments. . . . The 
ladies may remove their wraps, second floor rear; gen- 
tlemen, second floor front. . . . Buffet supper served 
in the dining room at seven. Help yourself. After 
the entertainment, or between numbers, late comers 
may go below and partake of what's left. Smoking 
material and some mild fluids for the gentlemen in the 
"den" — second floor front. Smoking is also endured 
in the library after eight, but not elsewhere. . . . 
Every guest is required to "register" in one or more 

67 



Prefaces 



of the albums in the library — and to write something 
besides a mere name. There will be a clock in every 
room. Curfew shall not ring, but eleven o'clock is 
late enough. We should all be in bed by twelve. — Eu- 
gene V. Brewster, Vice-President, pro tern. 

Eleven o'clock Is late enough, wild spirits 
though we be! Some of us have to go all the 
way to Pineapple street, through the hurly- 
burly of Brooklyn's night life, of a Sunday 
evening when the churches are letting out, so 
let us take our wraps from the second floor, 
rear and front, put them over our semi-formal 
dress, write our mot In the album and sally 
forth . . . these are mad nights, these nights 
In Brooklyn's Bohemia, but we must not overdo 
them! 

But let us not be overly careful as we pass 
Borough Hall ... let us be jovial, and chant 
whimsically as we go, with a wicked thought 
that It will be twelve by the clock on the Eagle 
Building before we retire, a stanza or two from 
"Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night!" And, as 
that Bohemian, F. P. A., used to say, "so home 
and to bed." 

William Marlon Reedy, we understand, is 
60 



Preface to the Prospectus of a Club 

to come all the way from St. Louis to Brook- 
lyn to recite the entire poem, "Curfew Shall 
Not Ring To-night," for this new La Boheme 
Club some evening. 
Ah, this is the viel 



Preface to a Medium'' s Dope 
Book 




Preface to a Medium's Dope Book 



This volume was put Into our hands by a pro- 
fessional spiritualistic medium who felt that a 
change of scene was, temporarily at least, to 
his advantage. He left town hurriedly. There 
was a train wreck, and he "passed over." 

We have tried many times since to get Into 
communication with him for the purpose of 
asking him what to do with the book, but with- 
out success. 0»ie would think that a medium's 
ghost might find it easier to get a message across 
than any other sort of spirit. But Mr. Pedder 
had nothing to add after death to the volume 
which he so laboriously compiled during life. 

There are in the book explicit directions for 
producing nearly every phenomenon known to 
psychical research, and there is a list of places 

73 



Prefaces 



and persons from which and from whom the 
latest tricks and apparatus may be purchased. 
Materialization was nothing to Mr. Pedder 
(until he died, that is). 

There is a catalog of some twelve thou- 
sand citizens of various American conjjnuni- 
ties who believe in spirit communication, with a 
longer or shorter entry after each name. From 
this catalog one may glean such information 
as this: ''Mr. and Mrs. Henry Blank, No. 
Rosalie Court, Chicago; well-to-do re- 
tired haberdasher; son, Albert, entered spirit 
life August i8, 1901, aged 21; daughter, 
Martha, passed over Jan. 10, 1904, aged 19, 
on eve of marriage. Albert, student Chicago 
university; was taking course in philosophy; 
has met Plato, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius in 
spirit life, etc." 

Pedder, before he passed over himself, told 
us how such information was collected by me- 
diums and passed from one to another. A 
medium entering a community a stranger — and 
dealing with people ''about whom it was abso- 
lutely impossible he could know anything at all" 

74 



Preface to a Medium's Dope Book 

— knows a great deal, thanks to his dope book. 

More Interesting, to us, was Pedder himself. 
For, in spite of knowing all the tricks of the 
trade, he was the most credulous mortal we 
ever met. Pedder would go to seances, not 
primarily to admire the technique of some pro- 
fessional brother or sister, but with the ever-re- 
current hope of seeing something inexplicable 
by any hypothesis of trickery. 

**Gee!" he would say to us after such an ex- 
perience. '*I thought for a minute last night 
I was up against the real thing!'* 

^Well?" we would ask. 

"It wasn't," Pedder would say sadly. "Just 
a smooth worker. I watched him close, hop- 
ing all the time it was straight goods, but finally 
I got hep to how he done it." Pedder was not 
always grammatical. 

"I can do it myself with a little practice," 
Pedder would say with a sigh. "Listen — here's 
what he done — and it's a peach, too . . ." and 
Pedder would proceed to demonstrate and ex- 
plain. 

Once he delivered himself to this effect : 
75 



Prefaces 



^'There's gotta be spirits! I was talkin' to 
Eddie Slicker last week. You know who Eddie 
is, don't you? Smoothest worker in the busi- 
ness. *Eddie,' I says, 'do you always fake it?' 
*Tom,' he says, 'so help me, there's times 
when I don't know whether I'm f akin' it or not.' 
*Eddie,' I says, 'don't bull meT 'Tom,' he says, 
'I wouldn't. But so help me, Tom, there's 
been more'n once when these dam' skeptics had 
me in a corner that something helped me out of 
the hole! Tom,' he says, 'there's gotta be 
ghosts I' 'Eddie,' I says, 'the same thing has 
happened to me!' " 

"But has it?" we asked. 

"No," he admitted. "I was just bulling 
Eddie. But is that any sign Eddie was bulling 
me?" 

And then, after much deep thought : 

"Where there's a demand there's gotta be a 
supply. Ain't that logical, huh? If there 
wasn't any ghosts how would people get the 
notion of askin' for 'em in the first place? 
What? Look at all these scientists — all these 
psychical researchers. Do you mean to tell me 

76 



Preface to a Medium's ^Dope Book 

all those educated men are bein* fooled? Not 
on your life! There's ^otta be spirits!" 

"But youVe fooled some of the scientists 
yourself," we reminded him. 

"What does that prove?" he answered us 
indignantly. "Just because I put across a phony 
check, is that a sign there's no good checks? 
Not on your life ! The trouble with you skep- 
tics is that you can't believe nothing!" 

It is the trouble with skeptics; but it always 
made poor Pedder very downcast when we re- 
minded him that we had actually been on the 
road to belief when we had met him and he 
had in his vanity shown us his box of tricks. 

"I don't deny," he would say, "that I have 
been a stumbling block to you. But think of 
all the others in the world I've made believers 
of! I've given a lot of satisfaction to d, lot o' 
people, I tell you! I been led to it — led by 
an occult power to do the good I've done! I 
tell you, there's gotta be spirits!" 

But Pedder's ghost, in spite of an agreement 
that the one who died first would appear to the 
other, has never come back to look for his 

77 



Prefaces 



book. Probably the conditions are not right. 
.We publish the book in a last effort to hear 
from the author. 

It is the sort of monument Pedder would 
hate; anything his ghost can compass to pre- 
vent its issue that ghost will not fail to attempt. 



Preface to a Treatise on a 

New Art 




Preface to a Treatise on a New Art 



Uncle Peleg HIgglesworth never suspected 
that he was to become the basis of a New Art, 
which was, moreover, destined to perish with 
the passing of his spirit. When he came on 
from Illinois to pay a long visit to his nephew 
Jason and Jason's wife, who lived In Green- 
wich Village and were painters. It was not be- 
cause he was Interested In any sort of art what- 
ever ... he had determined to collect a good 
time In advance on the money which he had 
planned to leave Jason. 

When Uncle Peleg arrived It was late at 
night, and he was put to bed on a couch In an 
alcove of the studio apartment which the 
younger HIgglesworths Inhabited. Ten min- 
utes after he had retired Jason and Mrs. Jason 
leapt from their bed, clasped each other in a 

81 



Prefaces 



wild alarm and stood trembling and interro- 
gating each other with terror-stricken eyes. 

"It is the Sixth Avenue elevated," mur- 
mured Jason, after a moment. "A train has 
left the track and is crashing through the Jef- 
ferson Market building." 

"No, Jason, it is a bombardment," said his 
wife. "I hear the shrill cries of the dying 
women and children mingled with the scream 
of the shells. German U-boats have got into 
the North River and are battering down New 
York." 

But it was neither. It was Uncle Peleg snor- 
ing. Uncle Peleg's snores could express many 
things, but there are no words that can express 
Uncle Peleg's snores. 

Some snores and snorers one may get used 
to, but Uncle Peleg snored in many moods; he 
was versatile and various in his snoring; sail- 
ors never get so they enjoy hurricanes, and the 
dwellers on the flanks of Vesuvius take no de- 
light in volcanic eruptions ; and the winds of the 
Horn and the thunders of Vesuvius were both 
in Uncle Peleg's snore, but more than merely 



Preface to a Treatise on a New Art 

these was there. In its milder and gentler 
moods the snore was as If a thousand wildcats 
were rushing In waves of passion to battle 
against and die among a hundred moaning buzz 
saws. There was this In Uncle Peleg's snore, 
and there was more than this. A saint might 
walk through hell without suffering, protected 
by his holiness; but If a devil were to walk 
through heaven he would become distressingly 
vocal with pain, and there would be what hu- 
man beings could understand In the expression 
of his ultimate pathos and self pity . . . there 
would be a note that men could understand, 
but no waking man could reach or reproduce it. 
There was all this In Uncle Peleg^s snore, and 
there was more. 

In his waking hours. Uncle Peleg was quite 
like other retired bankers who have come on 
to New York to visit their relations and en- 
joy life for a while before they settle down to 
die. When he was spoken to about his snor- 
ing, he would say, incredulously: *'Snore? 
Snore? You think I snore, do you? Shucks I 
More'n likely you hear yourself snoring." And 
83 



Prefaces 



Jason HIgglesworth and his wife would say 
no more . . . for, after all, were they not to 
inherit Uncle Peleg's money? And the old 
man saw to it that they had a good time while 
he stayed with them; he was liberal, and eager 
for amusement — although, when he occasion- 
ally fell asleep at a theater or the opera or in 
a restaurant, it took all the tact that Jason and 
his wife possessed to extricate themselves from 
the situation. 

But one day Uncle Peleg suddenly an- 
nounced that he had lost all his money. He 
had been meddling with the stock exchange. 
Gratitude for what he had done, gratitude for 
what he had intended to do, common decency, 
impelled the nephew and his wife to offer 
Uncle Peleg a home as long as he should live, 
for he had no other relations in the world and 
could no longer work. 

His loss of money affected the old man 
strangely. With it he lost all interest in life, 
apparently, and he found it difficult to keep 
awake at all, day or night. Formerly his sleep- 
ing hours were no more than those of the av- 
84 



Preface to a Treatise on a New Art 

erage man, although he used them so differ- 
ently; but now he would lapse into his terrible 
and devastating slumber at meals, or sitting in 
front of the fire in the afternoons, or while 
riding in a street car, or even while assisting 
with the housework, which became one of the 
old man's humble duties. 

And always when he woke he would say: 
"Snore? Snore? People think I snore? Like- 
ly you snore yourself, Jason." But Jason and 
his wife could no longer work at painting pic- 
tures because of the old man's noise; and this 
was serious, for now they must live by paint- 
ing pictures and support him, too. 

They were obliged to take a smaller and 
cheaper studio, and this .was terrible, for It 
brought them still nearer to Uncle Peleg, who 
now slept far more than he waked. But still 
sentiments of loyalty forbade Jason and his 
wife turning the old man out upon a startled 
and echoing world. 

One day as Mrs. Jason and her husband 
paced up and down the studio and looked at 
the old man, who had been stricken with sleep 
85 



Prefaces 



as he was wiping the breakfast dishes, and 
stood bending over the sink snoring out a bat- 
tle piece that would have made Wagner en- 
vious, an idea came to Jason. 

"My dear," he told his wife, "it has just 
occurred to me what Uncle Peleg's snores 
really are. When man sleeps his subconscious 
mind is in control and his ego ranges back 
through all the past life of the race ... in 
Uncle Peleg's snores we hear the Cave Man 
fighting with the Boar, in Uncle Peleg's snores 
Is the orchestral expression of the evolution of 
the human being.. Each snore represents a 
nightmare, and each nightmare Is a drama and 
a dream of some struggle, fearful and fatal 
and beastly, that actually occurred away back 
in the dim dawn of time. The wandering ego 
of our Uncle Peleg comes downward from the 
days before man was really man, comes down 
from pre-Adamic times and sings its saga as 
it comes. I have an idea. . . ." 

Jason's artistic problem was to control this 
vocal hobo soul of Uncle Peleg's in its expres- 
sion. With cleverly devised pedals and levers 



Preface to a Treatise on a New Art 

and keys and stops, wrought into an instrument 
harnessed about the palpitating body of Uncle 
Peleg, with weights and wires so arranged that 
pressure upon the solar plexus, the medulla 
oblongata and various other nervous centers 
could be increased, decreased and regulated at 
will — Jason finally realized his plan. 

He would sit for long hours at The Uncle 
Peleg practicing, until he could present a sound- 
drama of Pleistocene Man spearing a Dinosaur, 
or a tribe of nondescript arboreal half-simian 
creatures slaying a mastodon with fire-hardened 
sticks thrust into the creature's eyes, and then 
he hired one of the small Greenwich Village 
theaters and made his public appearance. 

Hermione was there . . . "How primeval I" 
said Hermione. 

It was a New Art 

Fame poured in upon the Higglesworths, 
and gold. But just as they had made arrange- 
ments to transfer The tlncle Peleg to one of 
the larger Broadway auditoriums, something 
happened ... an overstrained membrane, 
perhaps, burgt . . . who knows wiiat? Any- 



Prefaces 



way, it was In the gloaming, and at home, as 
Uncle Peleg would have wished it to be. 

"Snore? Snore? So you think I snore, do 
you? Snore yourself!'* were the old man's 
last words. 

And he drifted out into the unknown on the 
wild blast and vibrant wind of one last long 
moaning snore that shook the Island of Man- 
hattan from the Woolworth Building to Grant's 
Tomb. 



Preface to a Memorandum 
Book 




Preface to a Memorandum Book 

Darius, one of Persia's most enterprising 
kings and indefatigable publicists, became vio- 
lently angry against the Athenians one day. 
They had helped certain Greeks resident in 
Asia Minor in a revolt against his authority. 
Therefore, Darius swore by the name of Or- 
mazd and by the bones of Cambyses that he 
would smear Athens into a pasty reminiscence 
when he got around to it. 

But the cares of kingship are many. Darius 
was so busy ruling his subjects and causing 
praises of himself to be chiseled upon the cliff 
of Behistun that whole days would go by when 
he would forget to execrate the Athenians. D^ 
rius was by nature a forgetful man. He would 
awaken at night with the plaguing sense of 

91 



Prefaces 



something Important left undone ; he would He 
tossing on his couch until the morning chariots 
began to rattle along the cobbled streets of 
Persepolls before he remembered that the 
thing he had omitted doing the day before was 
to hate the Athenians. 

Things could not go on in this fashion. The 
Athenians were getting too much sleep and 
Darius too little. Some means must be found 
of reminding the king to be passionately angry 
at the Athenians every day. The magi were 
consulted. They advised that the office of Hu- 
man Memorandum Book be created. It was 
done. A young man of good family was select- 
ed and invested with the salary, dignity, re- 
sponsibility and apparel of the post. His name, 
we should say at a guess, was Marmaduke. At 
any rate, we think of him as Marmaduke. He 
dressed his hair in flat, oiled ringlets and wore 
gilded sandals. 

Marmaduke, each day as the king drew back 

his chair after luncheon, would walk nobly into 

the great dining room of the palace at Susa, 

announced by shawms and trumpets and at- 

92 



Preface to a Memorandum Book 

tended by slaves and pages, and cry, flinging 
up his hand gracefully and dramatically: 

"Hail, King I" 

*'Hail, Marmaduke!" the king would reply. 

*'0 King! Remember I" Marmaduke would 
proceed. 

*'0 Marmaduke! Remember what?" the 
king would ask, and Marmaduke, signaling for 
another blare of shawms, would come three 
steps nearer and declaim, In a resonant tenor 
voice . . . 

Somehow, we have a very strong sense of this 
Marmaduke's personality; he used a great deal 
of scent, and the fringes of his cape jingled as 
he walked; his eyes were of a hazel color and 
even In mid-gesture they would sometimes slide 
sidewise toward the queens drawn up in rows 
about the dining room waiting for Darius to 
finish eating so that they might begin; he* was a 
connoisseur of fighting bulls and a patron of 
sculptors; he often affected to be bored when 
captives were strangled in the courtyard of 
an afternoon; he made little poems and had 
limited editions of them baked on cream-col- 
9S 



Prefaces 



ored bricks; he was proud of his archery and 
felt disgraced when he shot down a workman 
from a roof to please the ladies if his arrow 
had not pierced the fellow precisely through 
the eye; a merry, exquisite, gallant sort'of chap 
was Marmaduke, with Interests both esthetic 
and athletic . . . 

Marmaduke would declaim, In his pleasant 
tenor voice: 

*'0 King! Remember the Athenians!'* 

And then the king would remember them and 
would think of them with the most deadly in- 
dignation, and he would go cheerfully through 
the day and calmly through the night. . . . 
For a while all was well . . . for a while , . . 

Darius, although he learned to remember the 
Athenians, with Marmaduke to help him, would 
often forget what particular thing It was he 
should remember about them. It was eight 
years before he went to war against them. . . . 
The forgetful man Is doomed. . . . Darius, 
In the year 486 B. C, while engaged in fitting 
out his third expedition against Greece, sudden- 
ly forgot what he was fitting out the expedition 
94 



Preface to a Memorandum Book 

for. None of the courtiers dared tell him un- 
less he questioned them, for that would have 
shown superiority to the king; each day Marma- 
duke would tell him to remember the Athenians, 
but Marmaduke did not presume to tell him 
why they were to be remembered. Darius died, 
in the midst of the vast host he had assembled, 
of protracted Insomnia. ... In the long run, 
the forgetful man always falls. . . . Darius 
was a great king in his day. . . . Give him 
time enough, and the man who cannot remem- 
ber will come to grief. . . . Where Is that 
Darius now? 

And yet. In looking over our own memo- 
randum book, we cannot find it in our heart to 
be too hard on the constitutionally forgetful. 
There are, in our book, a hundred little scrib- 
bled notes and reminders. We know what some 
of them signify. In detail. And in a general 
way we know what they all represent. They 
stand for a couple of years of unredeemed 
promises on our part. They proceed from a 
wide, vague, random feeling of good nature; 
an Ineffectual good nature, that never gets any- 
95 



Prefaces 



where in particular, and is worthy of no re- 
spect because it is not a positive quality. 

Or, at least, it began as a merely negative 
thing; though it may have acquired a positive 
force by this time. It began as an absence of 
active ill nature. It was our cue, being fat, to 
appear good-natured; the popular supposition 
that fat men are good-natured was too much 
for us ; we were too indolent to struggle against 
it. It would have troubled us greatly to have 
acted as mean as we felt, on many occasions; 
we were too selfish to expend our vital energy 
in hating certain persons as much as our moral 
perception told us they should be hated. Our 
affectation of good-nature finally became gen- 
uine ; and yet the good-nature is ineffectual. 

It comes out of us at odd times in the desire 
to have the moment pass pleasantly. We hear 
some one telling of his hopes and disappoint- 
ments and we are moved, and we say: "It 
sounds like a corking good idea; send your 
manuscript to us and we will take it to a pub- 
lisher for you; we know a lot of publishers." 

And he sends the manuscript, and after a 
96 



Preface to a Memorandum Book 

long while he gets it back again, because we 
have not remembered to take it to a publisher, 
and because we don't know any of them well 
enough to bother them with the manuscript of 
other people, anyhow. 

But, In the meantime, we have methodically 
made a note of it in the little book. And 
that and all the other notes in the little book 
torture us and even prevent us sleeping as 
much as we should between meals; the very 
sight of the little book brings on an agony of 
remorse. At times, when we feel ourself get- 
ting too cocky, we open the little book and look 
into it to mortify the spirit. 

And yet, we do not mean to lie about these 
things. We say, *'Yes; we will send you a 
copy of such and such a thing!" *Tes, we will 
get your brother a job!" "Yes, we will be 
glad to go to the dinner and make a little talk." 

But at the time we are sincere. There is 
nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of 
pleasure in a person's eye when he feels that 
we have sympathized with him, understood him, 
interested ourself in his welfare. At these mo- 
97 



Prefaces 



merits something fine and spiritual passes be- 
tween two friends. These moments are the 
-moments worth living. 

And — it had not occurred to us before, but 
the reflection comes to us as we write — these 
spiritual emotions are too rare and precious to 
have anything so gross and physical as an ac- 
tual deed follow them. It would coarsen and 
cheapen the communion if a more material 
service were tagged onto one of these divine 
interchanges of good will. It would insult our 
friend (or should insult him) to descend from 
the high, pure plane of golden promise to the 
toilsome level of performance; what he wants 
out of us (or what he should want) is not a 
job for his brother — he wants to stir our na- 
ture to a sympathetic understanding of his 
brother; he wants to strike from us a spark of 
generous disinterestedness. And it would be 
degrading to translate this heavenly mood into 
an earthly deed. 

As we say, this explanation had not occurred 
to us until a couple of minutes ago. And now 
that we have thought of it we shall be able to 
98 " 



Preface to a Memorandum Booh 

look at the little book hereafter with less of 
remorse; perhaps we will soon begin to cher- 
ish it as an evidence of our superiority. 

We donate the explanation to such of our 
readers as have similar little books on their 
consciences. 



Preface to a Hangman'' s 
Diary 




n 



Preface to a Hangman s Diary 

The Hangman whose observations are in- 
troduced by these remarks was for many years 
a deputy sheriff in a certain county where hang- 
ings were of frequent occurrence; no matter 
who was sheriff he was the sheriff's chief as- 
sistant and did the hanging. 

He had a strong notion of the dignity of 
his vocation; and he was an artist, with the ar- 
tist's peculiar vanities and sensibilities. When 
execution by means of the electric current was 
adopted in his state he hanged himself in the 
courtyard of the jail where he had hanged so 
many others, and did it quite beautifully. 

He did not care to survive the old order; the 
world would never wear quite the same face 
to him again, and so, he left it. This was sen- 
timentality, no doubt; and yet it was a senti- 
103 



Prefaces 



mentality sincerely felt and resolutely acted 
upon ; a sentimentality that we find lovely. Too 
many of us are so cowardly that we linger on 
quite uselessly after our enthusiasms have de- 
parted; but he adjusted the rope about his own 
neck and his leaden heart pulled him swiftly 
downward through the trap. 

This Hangman — Henk was his name, Oba- 
diah Henk, and he came of good, old, God- 
fearing Puritan stock — made a practice of get- 
ting on good terms with the men whom he was 
to hang during their last weeks in jail. He 
used to say that he had never hanged a strang- 
er; all his clients were his friends; he tried to 
put a personal touch into his work; the care- 
less, slipshod disposition of so many modern 
artisans who make no effort to cater to diversi- 
ties of individual taste was not his ; he liked each 
man who passed through his hands tc feel that 
he had made a conscientious study of that man's 
particular case. Henk and his "customers," as 
he used to call them, always grew very fond of 
each other before they parted. 

Henk had a pleasing way of carrying delica- 
104 



Preface to a Hangmaris Diary 

cies to those who were later to claim his profes- 
sional services, especially If they were thin. He 
hated to hang a very thin man or a very fat 
man; the Ideal weight, he used to say, was ex- 
actly one hundred and sixty-nine pounds, and 
he urged his friends to make that weight, wher« 
ever possible, against the great day. 

From his many conversations with his friends 
Henk gradually pieced together a theory as to 
what It is that sends men to the gallows. 

He presents it elaborately in his diary; brief- 
ly, his conviction may be stated thus: It is the 
mothers of the race who are its menace. Out 
of two hundred and eighty-seven men who told 
him the stories of their lives, Henk could trace 
the downfall of no less than two hundred and 
sixty-nine directly to their mothers. These (on 
the whole) well-meaning females had coddled 
their boys from the cradle, had implanted in 
each boy the idea that he belonged in a special 
category of humanity, and was therefore li- 
censed to consider himself superior to the ordi- 
nary communal restrictions. The undisciplined 
selfishness thus fostered In the nature of the boy, 
105 



Prefaces 



in combination with a will made weak and vio- 
lent by early indulgence, infallibly got him into 
trouble when he came into contact with the 
world. 

"The world's greatest evil," Henk writes on 
page 57 of his diary, "is mother love, and the 
race will not make any real progress until it has 
been abolished." Before women are allowed to 
become mothers, he argues, they should be spe- 
cifically and painstakingly trained for the task, 
for after they have achieved maternity the en- 
cradled race is at their mercy. 

The Spartan method of removing the boy 
from maternal jurisdiction at an early age did 
not appeal to Henk. His dictum was, make the 
mother train the child, but make her train him 
right. He seemed to think that the only way 
to have women trained to train boys right is 
for men to train the women. There is a flaw in 
every system, there is a point at which each 
philosophy ceases to advance and begins to run 
round in a circle like a kitten chasing its tail; 
Henk fails to explain how men, who have al- 
ready been given a wrong bias in infancy by 
106 



Preface to a Hangman s Diary 

women, are to overcome that bias suiEciently 
to teach their daughters how to teach their 
grandchildren. 

But one does not need to endorse Henk in 
everything in order to recognize that his occu- 
pation gave him a vantage point of peculiar 
value from which to con the human race. Per- 
haps he fell into the error of considering all 
men too narrowly, of looking at them too ex- 
clusively in relation to his own profession; but 
that is a fault common to all thinkers who take 
a keen and loving interest in their work. 

And Henk, at that, never became a mere vul- 
gar faddist. It is true that he might remark to 
an acquaintance on the street, after a lingering 
appraisal, ''Henry, you're getting fat; be care- 
ful, Henry; you've passed good hanging 
weight!" 

But, on the other hand, he had been known 
to say that he enjoyed a good glass of beer, or 
a good day's fishing, or a good dog fight, or 
what not, almost as much as hanging a man. 

With his pleasant theories and his little at- 
tentions to those to whom he was finally to 
107 



Prefaces 



minister, and his pride in his art, and his agree- 
able sentimentahty, Henk's personality is an ap- 
pealing one ; and our regret is that we can only 
indicate the character of his diary so briefly in- 
stead of presenting it. 



Preface to a Volume of 
Poetry 




Preface to a Volume of Poetry 

We have often been asked to read the poems In 
the following collection at teas and similar soul 
and culture fights. We have always refused. It 
is not, as some of our friends believe, because 
of any excess of timidity that we consistently 
refuse. 

It Is because no one wants to pay us what It is 
worth to us. We are perfectly willing, if we get 
enough money for It, to read poems at Teas, 
Dinners, Pugilistic Contests, Clam-bakes, Foot- 
ball Games, Prayer Meetings of Any Denomi- 
nation, Clinics, Divorce Trials, Balls, Dedica- 
tions, Lynchings, Launchings, Luncheons, Wed- 
dings, Jail Deliveries, Tonsil Removals, Ice 
Cream Socials, Legal Executions, Wrestling 
Matches, Tooth Pulllngs, Commencement Ex- 
ercises, Operations for Appendicitis, Coming 
111 



Prefaces 



Out Parties, Taffy Pulls, Better Baby Contests, 
Dog Shows, Gambling House Raids, Sunday 
School Picnics, Pool Tournaments, Spelling 
Bees, Adenoid Unvellings, Murders, Church 
Suppers and Cremations. But money we must 
have. 

For while reading one's own poems to a 
gang of strangers need not, of course, be abso- 
lutely degrading, yet it is bound to be a silly 
sort of performance. 

And it Is worth money. Poetry, with us, is a 
business; it takes time, muscular effort, nervous 
energy and, sometimes, thought, to produce a 
poem. 

People do not ask painters to go to places and 
paint pictures for nothing, but they are forever 
trying to graft entertainment off of poets. 

Our rates, henceforth, are as follows: 

For reading small, blond, romantic poems, 
thirty-five dollars per poem. Blond, dove-col- 
ored or pink lyrics prominently featuring the 
Soul, thirty-five dollars each. 

Humorous poems, not really very funny, 
twenty-five dollars each. 
IIP 



Preface to a Volume of Poetry 

Humorous poems, with slightly sentimental 
flavor, forty dollars each. 

Humorous poems, really quite funny, seventy- 
five dollars each. 

Dialect poems mentioning persons called 
**BI11," ^'Jlm," "Si," etc., Southern dialect, fifty 
dollars each; middle Western, fifty-five dollars. 

Pathetic dialect verse charged for according 
to the quantity and quality of pathos desired. 
(See rates on Mother and Old Sweetheart 
poems.) 

Sonnets, ten dollars each. Not less than five 
sonnets served with any one order. 

Pash poems, one hundred dollars each. Pash 
poems, however, will only be read from the in- 
terior of a heavy wire cage. 

Free verse, any kind, one dollar a line. 

No matter how long or how short the lines 
actually are, for business purposes a line of free 
verse is to be considered as containing seven 
words. 

Serious poems, melancholy tone, fifty dollars 
each. 

For ten dollars additional persons not to ex- 
113 



Prefaces 



ceed twelve In number will be permitted to file 
by and feel the poet's heart beat after reading 
sad poems; persons In excess of twelve in num- 
ber charged for at the rate of two dollars each. 

Serious poems, optimistic in nature, fifty dol- 
lars each. 

Old Sweetheart poems, in which she dies, 
one hundred dollars each. Old Folks at Home 
poems, sad, fifty dollars each; each reference 
to angels five dollars additional; father killed, 
mother left living, sixty-five dollars; both par- 
ents killed, seventy-five dollars; with dialect, 
one hundred dollars. Both parents killed dur- 
ing Christmas holidays, any dialect wanted, 
angels, toys, etc., two hundred dollars. Audi- 
tors' tears guaranteed, and for thirty-five dol- 
lars additional poet also will cry while reading 
this old reliable line of family poetry. 

Religious poems, not more than five stanzas, 
one hundred dollars each. 

Agnostic poems, latest cut, one hundred thir- 
ty-five to one hundred seventy-five dollars each. 

These agnostic goods are for very exclusive 
114 



Preface to a Volume of Poetry 

circles, as are our radical and anarchistic poems, 
which come at two hundred dollars each. 

Tame revolutionary poems, usual Green- 
wich Village sort of thing, fifty dollars each; if 
read in Flatbush, sixty-five dollars each. 

Really quite shocking revolutionary poems, 
two hundred dollars each. A very modern line 
of goods. 

Write for special combination offers and rates 
on limericks. We have limericks listed in three 
categories : 

Limericks Where Ladies Are Present. 

Limericks Where Ladies Are Absent but 
Clergymen Are Present 

Limericks. 

In the event that we are expected to Be Nice 
and Meet People, 20 per cent, added to above 
rates. 

If expected to Meet People, and Being Nice 
is left optional with us, only 5 per cent, added 
to above rates. 

Conversation on poetry or related topics 
charged for at rate of $75 an hour in addition 
to reading charges. 

115 



Prefaces 



Conversation on Rabindranath Tagore: 
Listened To, $750 an hour. Participated In, 
$1,000 the first hour and $350 for every addi- 
tional ten minutes thereafter. 

Limericks composed on spot (discreet) twen- 
ty-five dollars each. Impromptu couplets, good, 
twenty dollars each; medium, twelve dollars 
and fifty cents each; quite bad impromptu coup- 
lets, five dollars each. 

Poetry written by host, hostess or any guest, 
listened to at rate of one hundred dollars per 
quarter hour. 

Compliments on same to author, ten dollars 
each additional. 

Compliments spoken so as to be overheard by 
more than eight persons, twenty dollars each. 

Compliments dashed off In little informal 
notes, forty dollars each if notes are initialed, 
one hundred dollars each if notes are signed 
with full name. 

For pretending to like Amy Lowell's work 
our rate Is $1,000 an hour or any fraction 
thereof. 

No orders filled amounting to less than two 
116 



Preface to a Volume of Poetry 

hundred dollars for ninety minutes' work. Cer- 
tified check must be mailed with orders. 

Prices quoted are f. o. b. Pennsylvania Sta- 
tion, N. Y. City. 

Patrons will always confer a favor by re- 
porting any inattention on the part of the audi- 
ence. 



Preface to Old Doctor 
Gumph^s Almanac 



maii 




Preface to Old Doctor Gumph's 
Almanac 

This Almanac, from the picture of the partially 
flayed gentleman in the front to the final adver- 
tisement for Old Doctor Gumph's Wonder Oil 
for Man and Beast, on the back cover, is a work 
of joy and mystery and fascination; it leads the 
believing mind along paths that skirt forever the 
boundary . between the known and apparent 
world and the glad realms of poetry and conjec- 
ture. 

There is something magical on every page of 
it. 

Doctor Gumph's Wonder Oil is almost a mir- 
acle by itself. 

It is marvelous that the abdominal cavity of 

the partly peeled gentleman aforesaid should 

have such an effect upon the constellations — or 

perhaps it is the constellations that affect him. 

121 



Prefaces 



It Is wonderful that any one should know 
whether it is going to rain or snow on April 27, 
but Doctor Gumph knows and tells. It Is in- 
credible that the moon should have been 
weighed, but Its weight is printed on page 27, 
between Mother Shipton's Prophecy and a rec- 
ipe for preserving watermelon rind. 

Science, here, is the fellow and the com- 
panion of song; we give a hand to each and 
follow with an Innocent spirit and they conduct 
us to a place where the veil Is so thin that we 
can peep through and catch a glimpse of Na- 
ture at her occult work. 

But we must be pure in heart and put sophis- 
tication from us, even as the Percivals and Gala- 
hads who sought for the Grail. No scoffer 
could follow a tablespoonful of Doctor 
Gumph's Wonder Oil down through the esoph- 
agus and into the stomach and out through the 
pylorus and watch it at its wizard work of creat- 
ing a new duodenum out of nothing. These In- 
ductions into the esoteric, these glances at cre- 
ation In a lyric mood, are only for eyes that have 
not been filmed over with the horn of cynicism. 



Preface to Old Doctor Gumph's Almanac 

The minds nourished exclusively upon Alma- 
nacs such as this of Old Doctor Gumph should 
be full of variety and delight. Astronomy came 
out of astrology, chemistry came out of al- 
chemy, and they are forever striving to escape 
from the prosaic and return to the untram- 
meled state whence they came. Old Doctor 
Gumph likes to encourage them. Science, in 
the hands of Old Doctor Gumph, is not labo- 
rious and exact and uninteresting; he perpetu- 
ates old legends and creates new ones. The 
secret of his Wonder Oil for Man and Beast 
was told him by a dying gypsy, who strayed into 
his camp in the Everglades, and the formula 
had been handed down by word of mouth for 
scores of generations; the recipe was known to 
the Egyptian priests four thousand years a^o, 
and without the Wonder Oil to heal their bruis- 
es and harden their muscles and correct their 
digestive systems the workmen of Khufu would 
never have been able to build the great p)rra- 
mid. Later, Doctor Gumph hints, it played an 
important part in the Eleusinian Mysteries. 

Old Doctor Gumph is a liar, and yet it Is safe 
123 



Prefaces 



to plant beans when he tells you to plant them, 
for that bit of lore actually was handed down 
from the priestly scientists of old Egypt, who 
said they got it from Osiris. 

There is something in humanity that always 
leaps up and believes again at the bidding of 
spells and charms and incantations; and this is 
a true instinct, for the incantation is an attempt 
to sing in tune with the vaster rhythms and the 
tidal moods of the creating universe. So, we 
say, the mind nourished exclusively upon Doc- 
tor Gumph's Almanac should be a more inter- 
esting and companionable mind than the one 
cultivated by some of the modern dogmatists of 
science who jeer at the Imagination. 

We never knew but one such person. 

This was a woman who lived in a little house 
In the woods about a mile from a small town 
In the middle West, and the woods were full of 
her children. She had buried three husbands, 
and she used to sit in the doorway of her cottage 
and smoke her corncob pipe and look at their 
graves, which were In a row among a clump of 
hazel a little way from her door, and speculate 
124 



Preface to Old Doctor Gumph's Almanac 

upon life and death and the world and the 
weather and husbands, and whether any one 
would ever marry her again. All her reading 
had been almanacs; she had never read any- 
thing else, and every Saturday she went to town 
and searched the counters of the two drugstores 
for new ones. Old Doctor Gumph was her fa- 
vorite, but her mind was open; she read them all. 
She loved the striking words in the pam- 
phlets, and she had named her eighteen children 
from them. There was Zodiac, a girl, and the 
eldest, known familiarly as Zody; there were 
Cartilage and Anthrax and Peruna, and Epider- 
mis; there was Whitsuntide and Pellagra and 
Gumph and Pisces; there were Perihelion and 
Tonsllitis and Everglade and Oppodeldoc and 
the twins. Total Eclipse and Partial Eclipse, 
and there was poor little Lunar, who had some- 
thing the matter with his eyes, and who, al- 
though he was four years old, could not walk, 
and was dragged about everywhere on a sort 
of sled made of barrel staves by Capricorn and 
Peroxide. 

125 



Prefaces 



Mrs. Akely loved these names; but she had 
found a name that she loved better than them 
all, and she would sit and smoke her pipe and 
wish for another child that she might name him 
Cerebellum. But It did not seem likely that she 
would marry again, for she was no longer young 
and she was not attractive; she habitually neg- 
lected her personal appearance, using snuff as 
well as smoking tobacco. She bore her grief 
and disappplntment as well as she could, but It 
ached her within, and all her wise and whole- 
some talk of the weather and the Seven Won- 
ders of the World and love philters and the ef- 
fect of the moon upon young plants and the 
magic properties of Gumph's Oil was uttered 
through an almost palpable atmosphere of wist- 
ful and hopeless longing. How many of these 
balked and pathetic figures there are in the 
world I 

Doctor Gumph — Old Doctor Gumph! — 
what a mind he has! If he had not been a 
great scientist he would have been a great Sun- 
day Editor 1 



Preface to a Book of 
Paragraphs 



Preface to a Book of Paragraphs 

Solomon, the first Paragrapher of whom we 
have authentic record — and, indeed, one of the 
best of us — got more fun out of It than any 
one of us ever has since. 

For Solomon was King in Jerusalem. 

When Solomon produced a quip of which he 
was especially proud he would have It graved 
on a tablet of brass five cubits square, and It 
would be set over against the base of one of the 
two pillars that were before the temple. If It 
was a serious paragraph It would be set over 
against the right hand pillar, Jachin, and if it 
was a humorous paragraph it would be set over 
against the left hand pillar, which was called 
Boaz. And if the people saw something on 
Boaz they knew it was to be laughed at, and 
they laughed. In the course of time it became 
the custom about Jerusalem when a man had 
129 



Prefaces 



said something especially witty to remark: 
"That is one on Boaz." 

Having produced his Quip and set up the 
brazen tablet against Boaz, the King would 
send out Asaph, Heman and Jeduthun, and 
their sons and their brethren, arrayed in fine 
linen, with cymbals and psalteries and harps, 
and with them a hundred and twenty Levites 
sounding upon trumpets; and this procession 
winding through the streets of the city was sure 
to attract a crowd. Asaph, Heman and Jedu- 
thun, halting at each of the busiest corners, 
would announce, after an alarum and flourish of 
trumpets : 

"Behold, O Israel, it hath pleased thy King, 
yea even Solomon, thy King, to write for thee 
an exceedingly clever Paragraph. It sitteth 
over against the pillar Boaz, for the King is 
good; out of his loving kindness hath he caused 
the Quip to be placed upon the pillar Boaz, that 
his people may read and rejoice thereat. There- 
fore, assemble at the pillar Boaz, and rejoice 
with Exceeding great mirth, and praise the King, 
yea, even Solomon, thy King; out of thy mouths 
ISO 



Preface to a Book of Paragraphs 

laugh, and with a great noise of laughter make 
the earth to shake, lest an evil thing befall thee; 
lest plague and pestilence seize upon the land 
and the King rage amongst his loving people 
with fire and sword. Get thee to the pillar 
Boaz, for thy King would have thee merry." 

And then the procession would go on to the 
next corner. 

Solomon would sit upon the throne of ivory, 
overlaid with pure gold, which the workmen of 
Hiram of Tyre (the original Roycrofter) 
fashioned for him — and which was always 
brought out and placed, on these occasions, be- 
tween the two pillars — and all Judah and Is- 
rael and Benjamin would file before him and 
look at the pillar Boaz, and laugh. It was at 
one such affair that the Queen of Sheba re- 
marked to Solomon: 

*'Thou exceedest the fame that I heard. 
Happy are thy men, and happy are these thy 
servants." 

The King, it may be inferred, loved to have 
the happiness of his servants commented upon, 
for: "King Solomon gave to the Queen of Sheba 
131 



Prefaces 



all her desire, whatsoever she asked" . . . She, 
there is no doubt, had been something of an 
inspiration to him in his writing; no doubt he 
owed the tone and turn of many a paragraph to 
her: ^'Neither (says an ancient Chronicler) was 
there any such spice as the Queen of Sheba gave 
to King Solomon." 

Now and then a Hittite or a Perizzite, newly 
from the provinces, unacquainted with the fash- 
ionable jargon of Jerusalem, and wondering 
what it was all about, would look at the brazen 
plate set over against the pillar Boaz and fail 
to laugh as he passed by. He would gape, with 
hanging bucolic jaws, as he puzzled over the 
Quip, and stumble dully down the street, scowl- 
ing in his perplexity. Solomon, indicating him 
with his scepter, would murmur to the Captain 
of the Guard: 

"There goeth one void of understanding; 
yea, a fool ; he hath not an understanding heart. 
He hath not said unto Wisdom, thou art my 
sister! nor called Understanding, my kinswom- 
an! He is an abomination to my land; the 
mouth of the foolish is a present distraction, 
132 



Preface to a Booh of Paragraphs 

Shall there not be a rod for the back of him 
that is void of understanding? Yea, and an ar- 
row shall strike through his liver!'* 

And the Captain of the Guard, a man chosen 
for his ability to take a hint without a kick, 
would know what to do, and would do it, mut- 
tering: "Good understanding giveth favor; but 
the way of the transgressor is hard !" 

It is to be supposed that the people of Jeru- 
salem, even though they admired and appreciat- 
ed their King, sometimes would laugh only in 
a perfunctory manner, for we find Solomon com- 
plaining about the twentieth year of his reign : 
"Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and 
the end of mirth is heaviness !"• He was a King 
who was always watching his people to do them 
good; he was an observant King, and he had 
noticed that. 

Ah ! that was the life I 



Preface to a Book of Patterns 



Preface to a Booh of Patterns 

The universe exists; It always has; It always 
will ; everything which Is now in it was always 
In It and always will be. It cannot escape itself. 
But fresh combinations of existing elements 
are infinitely possible. And the universe, being 
unable to commit suicide and end It all — and be- 
ing unable to go crazy and forget Itself, since 
Its craze would immediately be the standard of 
sanity — keeps very busy producing these fresh 
combinations of Its various parts In order to 
relieve the otherwise intolerable tedium of being 
the universe. 

A little reflection on the part of the young 
philosopher-poets who are forever reproaching 
the universe for being what it is should induce 
in those gentlemen a more liberal and lenient at- 
titude. After all, the universe Is doing the best 
it can. Our feeling toward It, when we have 
137 



Prefaces 



taken It up at all, in a serious way, has always 
been one of pity rather than blame. We may 
suggest reforms for the future, but we are not 
inclined to dwell harshly upon past mistakes; it 
is, on the whole, a friend of ours, and we are 
willing to allow bygones to be bygones; we sel- 
dom think of it without a sympathetic sense of 
how far It has come and how far It has to go 
and how tired it must be. And It Is likely that 
if it were a part of us, instead of our being a 
part of it, the reversal of conditions would re- 
sult in no more general satisfaction than obtains 
at present. We may add, in passing, that this 
continuing kindliness of ours with regard to the 
universe is all the more creditable to us since 
the universe has never yet unbent so far as to 
show us a manifestation of reciprocal good na- 
ture; it gives us everything we desire but com- 
pliments; it is a friend, but an austere friend. 
But we are not complaining; it Is intensely occu- 
pied; from center to circumference It is wearily 
or feverishly busy. (If It has a circumference; 
we can never think of its having one without 
wondering what is outside of the circumference ; 
138 



Preface to a Booh of Patterns 

and It Is equally discouraging to the mind to 
try to think of it as not having one. This Is a 
matter, however, which we propose to consider 
earnestly In a little essay to be entitled the 
*Treface to a Book of Hypodermic Needles.'') 
Our reflections upon the universe, we may as 
well state here, sprang from the contemplation 
of a Book of Patterns. The patterns set us 
to thinking about the shapes of things in gen- 
eral, and why things are the shapes they are, 
and from that, by easy gradations, we ap- 
proached a mood of wonder as to the shape of 
the universe Itself. We decided that it is spher- 
ical. We do not know how we know it is 
spherical ; but we defy you to say over and over 
to yourself, rapidly and steadily for thirty min- 
utes, that the universe is spherical, and then 
think of it as being any other shape. That is 
our dogma : The Universe Is Spherical ; we shall 
be at no pains to impose it upon you ; we merely 
point out to you how you may impose It upon 
yourself, if you wish; and the wish to receive 
any dogma must necessarily precede its accep- 
139 



Prefaces 



tance. This hint as to dogma we throw out 
gratuitously to those who are thinking of start- 
ing new religions or popularizing old ones. 
Make your dogma attractive at the start, and 
do not change it too readily; yet, if you must 
change It, change it courageously. No dogma 
lasts as long as the spiritual necessity which pro- 
duces all dogmas; every dogma has its day. If 
it ever occurs to us that the universe is not 
spherical after all, we shall publicly testify to 
our change of behef. 

This spherical universe, then, which we are 
presenting to your consideration — we hope not 
for the first time — is forever busily engaged in 
working up the same old parts of itself into 
new combinations, new shapes, new forms, be- 
cause It must keep interested in something and 
can't die. No new stuff, whether spiritual stuff 
or material stuff — If matter is anything but 
spirit that has bumped around till it got coars- 
ened and calloused — no new stuff Is available to 
the universe, and so what we call the process of 
creation consists of what Browning meant when 
he had Abt Vogler say : 
140 



Preface to a Book of Patterns 

"Out of three sounds . . . not a 
fourth sound but a star." 

To what extent gods participate personally In 
this process of creation is a problem that will 
likely have to wait for solution until we write 
another essay to be entitled ^'Preface to a Book 
of Court Plaster." But we should say, offhand, 
that gods do not bother much with the details. 
The one thing more interesting than making 
things would be to make things make them- 
selves. For instance, the gods at the present day 
are making man make himself. As Hermlone 
herself has remarked, so often and so feelingly, 
*'What would the human race be without evolu- 
tion ?'» 

But we Intended, using the Book of Pat- 
terns as a jumping-off place, to write some- 
thing about Art, and Form. And we have 
strayed into religion and science, as so many 
people do who talk about Art; perhaps the three 
are one. 

Form Is all there is to Art. Art is creation; 
Creation Is merely combining old parts of the 
universe Into new shapes; the only new thing 
141 



Prefaces 



that Art can bring to the universe is a new 
Form; when gods and men create their souls 
sweat with the ecstatic agony of the process and 
the sweat dribbles into the created thing and 
makes it hve; without this sweat nothing gets 
made, whether it is an avatar, a poem or a 
world; unless this soul-sweat gets into it (divine 
effluvia!) the avatar or the poem or the world 
amounts to nothing much; unless it has a Form 
to get into the sweat of the soul is in vain; it 
must have a Form to act upon and through. 
Some of the painters and poets mixed up with 
the "new" movements — vers libre, cubism, and 
that sort of thing, are really seeking new forms. 
More of them are trying to escape from Form 
altogether and still have Art. The latter imag- 
ine a vain thing. It can't be done. We have in- 
terrogated the universe, and we say so. . . . 
We intended to develop that one profoundly 
original idea into an entire essay, but we get off 
on the wrong foot again. It will have to wait for 
proper elaboration and particular application 
until we can get around to writing our "Preface 
to the Collected Poems of Fothergil Finch." 



Preface to the Works of 
Btlly Sunday 




Preface to the Works of Billy Sunday 

We have received, in connection with some re- 
marks we published in a New York paper con- 
cerning Billy Sunday, the preacher, several let- 
ters asking why we object to him. 

"Even if he is lacking in taste," one of them 
says, *'don't you think he is doing good?'* 

We do not. And we are not greatly con- 
cerned about his lack of taste. We are not 
shocked because he uses slang; slang may be the 
vehicle of genuine convictions. Nor do we 
worry about the amount of money he makes. 
Nor have his free and easy '^conversations with 
God," to be quite candid, particularly repelled 
us; for we can imagine a kind of person who 
145 



Prefaces 



might so "converse" with God very seriously 
and sincerely, and therefore not offensively. 

Our detestation of what he is doing goes 
deeper than his surfaces and manners; it goes 
to the essential spirit of the man as revealed in 
his continual, morbid emphasis on the idea of 
Hell. 

The word Hell rings through his sermons 
like a clanging tocsin. It seems never to be far 
from his tongue. The thought of Hell appears 
to be ever present in his mind. Fear, fear of 
Hell, is the chief motif of his performance. The 
sense of Hell as a waiting, reaching, creeping, 
enveloping, concrete thing he deliberately im- 
plants in the minds of his hearers. Directly or 
indirectly, but artfully and assiduously, he fos- 
ters the growth of this implanted fear until it 
bears its crop of hysteria. There is a smack of 
relish goes with his utterance of his threats and 
warnings; this crude, effective psychologist of 
terror knows his power and exults in the exer- 
cise of it. 

If we were a preacher of any sort, and a man 
came to us and said he wished to become a mem- 
146 



Preface to the Works of Billy Sunday 

ber of our church solely because he was afraid 
of going to Hell, we would not feel any great 
satisfaction or exultation; It would not seem to 
us that our creed had greatly triumphed. We 
might feel, indeed, that Hell had frightened a 
soul away from it; but we would not feel so 
sure that Heaven had attracted one to it. A 
man that is merely saved from Hell is only half 
saved; he has to work his way to Heaven yet; 
and he will not work his way thither because he 
is impelled by fear. 

To come to it briefly and directly, fear Is the 
most base and ignoble of motives. Men may be 
frightened into conformity, but never into vir- 
tue. We insult all the saints of all the creeds if 
we suppose that they sneaked and scurried into 
their Heavens with the curs of terror snapping 
at their heels. There are many myths concern- 
ing deity incarnate, but the instinct of humanity 
has always been too sound to imagine a Jesus or 
a Prometheus whose courage faltered. 

The creeds that have endured have endured 
because of the truth in them ; and this truth has 
always been a courage about life on earth and 
147 



Prefaces 



a high thought concerning the ultimate destiny 
of the spirit. Fiends have not prodded us up 
the difficult ascents of time, but our godlike men 
and heroes have gone before and beckoned, and 
the spark of divinity in our dust has flared up 
and we have struggled after them. 

To put the accent upon fear, in dealing with 
human souls, is to spread the cult of that from 
which we should strive to rescue men; it is to 
shove men backward into the jungles of their 
racial childhood; it degrades the intellect and 
deforms the spirit. 

But tell them confidently of a high and noble 
destiny, worth striving after for its own sake, 
and those who have fuel in them kindle. Nor 
is it any sordid bribe of joy that will truly awak- 
en them ; their real struggle is to be, and not to 
gainj when they have discerned in a Christ or a 
Buddha the thing they wished to be they have 
needed no other bribe; sacrifices have not re- 
pelled them, the austerities of the way have not 
daunted them ; they have striven and they have 
failed, but they still have striven. They will 
always be thrilled with the high romance of this 
148 



Preface to the Works of Billy Sunday 

eternal battle. Appeal to their fears, cultivate 
their fears, encourage their fears, play upon 
their fears: all that is easy enough to do, and 
they can be set milling like cattle by it; never- 
theless, however it may excite them emotionally, 
spiritually it is disintegrating and debasing. 

This unceasing talk of Hell is iniquitous, 
and the reek of it is an abomination beneath the 
clean and friendly sun; it is the last gabbling 
echo of the silly tales we gibbered when we 
were blue-lipped apes back yonder in the gray 
dawn of time ; and one day it will fall on silence ; 
there will come a language in which the thing is 
not. As skulls grow broader, so do creeds. It 
is not the devils we create from our fears and 
weaknesses that help us; it is our bolder 
thoughts that succor and sustain, our bolder 
thoughts, returning from communion with the 
gods we sent them out into the unknown to find 
or make. 



Preface to a Calendar 




Preface to a Calendar 

In a former preface we had something to say 
about the shape of the universe. We estab- 
lished the fact, we believe, that it is spherical. 
Having thus said all that it is essential to say 
about Space, let us take up Time in a serious 
way and see what can be made of it. 

We will deal more particularly with Future 
Time. It is difficult to discuss the Present, be- 
cause it will not hold still long enough. As for 
the Past, great portions of it lie open to the view 
of all men ; they see it differently, and anything 
we might say about it would be sure to start an 
argument. It is not our purpose, in these pref- 
aces, to argue with our readers; we merely in- 
tend to shout things at them and run on. 

The most interesting question with regard to 
the Future is whether it exists already, or 
153 



Prefaces 



whether It has not yet been created. Our own 
opinion is that a great deal of the Future exists 
already, and that it has not yet caught up with 
us. 

Or, to put it another way. Past, Present and 
Future exist simultaneously in different parts of 
the same solar system. 

Let us say that it takes eight thousand years 
for a ray of sunlight to travel from the sun to 
this earth. 

We do not know exactly how long it does 
take. We wish we did, for we like to be accu- 
rate even in these trivial details. There is a 
book in the house that might tell us. But we 
have just moved. And some confounded sliding 
arrangement at the side of the baby's crib was 
broken in the move. That side of the crib is 
now propped off the floor with twenty or thirty 
books. The book that tells exactly the distance 
from the sun to the earth and the length of time 
It takes a ray of light working union hours to 
go that distance is one of those particular books. 
We would rather (great as is our passion for 
exactitude) never know the facts than risk wak- 
154 



Preface to a Calendar 



ing the baby by trying to get the book.* Even 
in neighborhoods where we are known It has 
been whispered about that no child would cry 
like that unless his parents deliberately tortured 
him throughout the night. And in a new neigh- 
borhood . . . 

Let us say that It takes eight thousand years 
for a ray of light to travel from the sun to the 
earth. The light that makes this»day to-day left 
the sun centuries'before dog-faced Agamemnon 
launched his Grecian barks or Hector was a pup 
at Troy. A million days that we know not yet 
are already In existence and on their way to us, 
carrying with them their light and heat and the 
germs of their events, since all life is from the 
sun. A day that Is four thousand years within 
our Future is four thousand years within the 
sun's Past; the sun got rid of It, threw It at us, 
that many years ago ; half way between the sun 
and the earth that day speeds merrily along, 
making a brief Present wherever It passes, but 

*We have since found the book and learned that our 
figures are astonishingly incorrect. But the principle re- 
mains the same. 

155 



Prefaces 



we will not be here when it arrives. By the 
sun's time you and we, and the infant phenome- 
non across the hall reposing in such blessed un- 
sophistication above two dozen second hand vol- 
umes of encyclopedia full of entirely immaterial 
knowledge, have been dead nearly eight thou- 
sand years. 

One may have been dead that long, of course, 
and still feel young and strong occasionally; 
there is some comfort in that. And always, to 
remember that one has been dead that long, is 
a salutary check upon human vanity. It should 
give us — (we always try to get some moral re- 
flection into these prefaces) — it should give us 
a more kindly fellow feeling for such dusty 
celebrities as the Mummy of Rameses, the Pilt- 
down Skull and Senator La Follette. If it dis- 
courages ambition, it also discourages discour- 
agement. Since the sun threw off our death day 
nearly eight thousand years ago, it is scarcely 
worth while worrying about a future event that 
is so far in the past ; we will be sticking around 
somewhere when said death day reaches us, but 
156 



Preface to a Calendar 



no one need be expected to act as if he found 
any news In it when it gets here. 

This Future that rushes upon us, cries pres- 
ently and confusingly in our ears and is gone be- 
fore we can collect our wits to answer — where 
does It go to then? The day existed; It over- 
took us; It went by; does It still exist some- 
where ? It came to earth ; It left earth ; perhaps 
it took something as it went by — and is it now, 
with what It took, traversing the next planet to 
the west as you steer toward the cosmic jumping- 
off place? Does the day, with what we gave 
the day, await us? And may we overtake it by 
a sudden acceleration of speed, such as a soul 
must manifest when it pops hot and light and 
eager out of a body? — and may we live in the 
warm middle and tingling presence of that day 
again? It seems altogether possible to us that 
when we shlU through the pearly gates we may 
find some of these days sitting up with the lights 
all turned on waiting for us, like commuters' 
wives. 

Now and then we have the feeling that a cer- 
tain action has been performed before; we are 
157 



Prefaces 



arrested In mid-gesture with the consciousness 
that the situation is not new to us; it comes over 
us with a sudden eerlness that we are repeating 
a particular role; many persons are very subject 
to such uncanny seizures. Perhaps these strange 
moments are stray bits of days that our souls 
have lived through previously; bits that have 
been broken off somehow and are left lying 
about loose; they went by us and then they 
lagged, and now we have caught up with them 
again. 

There isn't, really, any such thing as Time. 
If there were there couldn't be eternity. Past, 
Present and Future are all alike, all one. There 
Is no time. There are only imperishable events, 
In the midst of which we flutter and change to 
something else and flutter on again. The Cos- 
mos — (poor thing!) — didn't begin and It can't 
end. 

Which is one advantage a preface has over 
the cosmos. 



Preface to a Study of the Cur- 
rent Stage 




Preface to a Study of the Current 
Stage 

I GAVE the boy who delivers the groceries a 
ticket to a war melodrama recently. A few 
days later he described the play to me. He de- 
scribed it as if he were a discoverer. 

"It was the darndest thing you ever saw," he 
said. "You get what it's about easier than you 
do a regular show, on account of them talking 
it out. But it seemed kind of funny at first to 
hear them chewing the rag like that. It didn't 
seem real, till you got used to it, like a regular 
show does." 

"What do you mean by a regular show?" I 
asked him, puzzled. 

He meant, I learned, the movies. I cross- 
questioned him. He has been going to the 
movies every time he could get hold of a spare 
nickel for seven or eight years, and he is now 
161 



Prefaces 



fifteen. He has been to a few vaudeville shows ; 
he has seen a couple of circuses. But the war 
play was actually the first spoken drama he had 
ever attended. 

It was a novelty to him. I gathered from 
v/hat he said that he felt like encouraging it. 
He took a liberal attitude towards this new 
thing, the spoken drama. It was quaint, it 
didn't move fast enough, it was too long, too 
many things happened in one place, and there 
was an abiding strangeness in hearing the spok- 
en words. But on the whole the queer experi- 
ment had made a big hit with him. 

"It's funny," he repeated, "it's darned funny 
to hear them chewing the rag like that every 
time they're getting ready to do something. But 
I kind of liked it when I got used to it. Though, 
of course," he concluded, "it ain^t a regular 
show." 

The movies have been shown to millions of 
people during the last ten years. They have 
chased a certain type of cheap melodrama off 
the boards. I wonder how many thousands, 
how many hundreds of thousands, of people 
16^ 



^ Preface to a Study of the Current Stage 

there are, from twelve to twenty years old, who 
regard them as the ^'regular show,'' and to 
whom the spoken drama would be more or less 
of a novelty I 



Preface to a Book of Safety 
Pins 



Preface to a Booh of Safety Pins 

Here they are, four In a row and two rows to a 
card, and a dozen cards bound into a neat little 
book ... a Little Book of Diaper Pins, of as- 
sorted sizes, compiled by affectionate hands. . . 
Yes; Diaper Pins! Why should we be more 
squeamish about mentioning these little neces- 
sary things than the women's magazines? . . . 
When we take our tone from the women's 
magazines we are certain we are not offending 
current taste. We have all worn Diaper Pins ; 
some of us have adjusted them with care and 
particularity about the persons of our agitated 
offspring; some of us hope, in our fatuous hu- 
man way, to stick them sentimentally into the 
undergarments of our grandchildren ... if 
we are permitted to. Will we be permitted to? 
We are not sure whether this is one of the 
167 



Prefaces 



privileges allowed by the ruling generation to 
doddering age, or not. Between the gruel of 
Infancy and the gruel of senility are many years 
of teeth; but before teeth come, and after teeth 
depart, we act and eat at the sufferance of those 
who can rule the roasts of life, and chew them. 

All that we know about Infants will, perhaps 
unfortunately, never be published. But we have 
had a thought of Interest to Young Fathers, 
and we pass It on : Do not resign your authority 
over your child too completely In favor of the 
Scientific Managers. 

Some years ago we became acquainted with 
an Infant whose parents had tried everything 
on him at least once. He should have been 
bursting with health ; he had been crammed with 
rules and regulations until every time he cut his 
finger he bled theories ; and yet, he was pallid. 
He was wan as a Dickens Child, In Chapter 
Forty-seven, just before the great master, with 
the light of murder In his eyes, rolls up his 
sleeves to Inflict a lingering death In seven thou- 
sand words of bastard blank verse. 

It was decided by his parents that something 
168 



Preface to a Booh of Safety Pins 

should be done at once for Frederick ... or 
'*Icky," as he was called. ... 

Our very pen protests; we blush for the hu- 
man race, but this unfortunate young animal 
was actually called Icky — heaven help him ! . . . 
We could not invent the name Icky; only that 
curious creature, a young mother, is capable 
of thinking up Icky. . . . 

It was decided, we say, that something should 
be done for Icky at once. Icky had gotten too 
far away from Nature, somehow. Icky would 
have to go Back to Nature. 

Young Icky, In short, would gain in all 
ways could he but frolic in the dirt, disport him- 
self upon naked soil, gambol gloriously in infan- 
tile abandon upon real earth. Mud pies, we be- 
lieve, were mentioned, tentatively. Icky was 
to have a debauch of wholesomeness. 

We supposed that his parents would take 
Icky to the beach and let him play with the 
ocean, or set him down In a park and encourage 
him to the pursuit and capture of his first angle- 
worm, or something of the sort. 

But no. Icky was not taken to the dirt. The 
169 



Prefaces 



dirt was brought to Icky. It was absolutely 
hygienic dirt. All the germs had been baked 
out of It In a laboratory. It had been fumi- 
gated and sterilized and made sanitary and anti- 
septic. It was clean dirt. 

There were several bushels of it, and they 
poured it onto a big piece of oil cloth in the hall, 
and Icky, appropriately garbed, was set down 
upon it. 

'Tlay, Icky I" said his mother. 

"Frolic, Icky I" said his father. 

*'Gambol, Icky I" said his mother. 

And Icky wanly gamboled. He was not en- 
thusiastic, but he played. He was puzzled, but 
he IS a patient child; he has learned a weary 
toleration of the various fads to which his par- 
ents subject him; he is obedient, and he pains- 
takingly frolicked. 

This first mad gambol of Icky's we were priv- 
ileged to witness. Inquiring a few weeks later 
as to how Icky and Mother Nature (that grand 
old nurse) were getting along together, we 
learned that Icky, the third time over the course, 
balked and refused absolutely to frisk at all. 
170 



Preface to a Book of Safety Pins 

The clean dirt was eventually thrown away — 
out Into the back yard, with common, ordinary 
dirt. 

Icky Is a peculiarly ungrateful child. In 
spite of all that his parents do for him, In the 
way of Scientific Management, he persists In 
remaining pale. 

We intended to limit ourselves to a few re- 
marks on Safety Pins, but, as usual, became 
more Interested In our own digression than our 
subject proper. The main thought was this: 
Why Is a thing of such potential deadllness as 
the Safety Pin still In use? Men will have to 
Invent a substitute ; women never will, or It had 
been done decades ago. In a future paper, to 
be entitled 'The Menace of the Mother," we 
may take up Safety Pins again . . . in a serious 
way. 



Preface to the Novels of 
Harold Bell JVright 








Preface to the Novels of Harold Bell 
Wright 

We decided about a year ago that we would Get 
Rich Quick. As we don't know anything in 
particular, it was obvious from the start that 
we would have to find some method of capitaliz- 
ing our ignorance. That naturally suggested 
writing a book. 

It was hopeless for us to attempt to write as 
good a book as Thackeray or Balzac might have 
written; we had decided to get rich quick, A 
good book takes time and thought. 

So we decided to write a poor book. We 
were certain we could do that. And we went 
and got one of Harold Bell Wright's books and 
read it just to see how it was done. Harold 
sells a million copies. Why couldn't we write 
the same sort of thing, and sign some one else*s 

rm 



Prefaces 



name to it, and get rich, and spend the rest of 
our life in a yacht writing poetry and corking 
it up in bottles and liirowing the bottles at the 
mermaids, and having a good time generally? 

But after reading the book we decided that 
we couldn't do it. We can write just as poorly 
as Harold Bell — we can write just as poorly 
as any one that ever lived — but we can't write 
the same kind of poor stuff that Harold Bell 
can. 

It suddenly struck us that out of all the mil- 
lions of Harold's readers we had never met one 
face to face. We made inquiries. No one we 
knew had ever met a Harold Bell Wright 
reader, or had ever met any one who knew one. 

We were piqued. We forgot entirely about 
getting rich quick In the new interest that had 
come to us. We determined that we would 
meet a Harold Bell Wright reader if the pur- 
suit occupied years of o. . time. The thing was 
not impossible. We know two people that read 
Gene Stratton Porter. 

Our deliberate efforts were defeated. But 
chance, a few months ago, flung the Harold Bell 
176 



Preface to Novels of Harold Bell Wright 

Wright Fan across our path. He was in a 
smoking compartment of a train that was get- 
ting away from Chicago, 111., as rapidly as it 
could, and he was engaged in his Favorite Vice 
— he was actually reading Harold Bell — when 
we spotted him. We lighted a cigar and looked 
out of the window and waited for things to de- 
velop. We knew they would. A reader of 
Harold Bell Wright, in a smoking compart- 
ment with us, we said to ourself, will certainly 
ask us What Our Line Is within thirty min- 
utes. 

When people In smoking compartments ask 
us our line we always say that we have been a 
lawyer, but are now studying for the ministry. 
If they still show an interest in our business, we 
at once develop an Interest in their souls. On 
several occasions we have gone so far as to con- 
vert people like that to different religions. 

This Harold Fan was a rather good looking 
chap, better looking than you are, likely, bet- 
ter dressed than we were, exuding an aii^ of 
prosperity. One could tell at a glance that he 
lived In Cleveland, liked living there, believed 
177 



Prefaces 



in Cleveland's Destiny, and could tell you to 
the yard how many miles of paved streets that 
city has, and would tell you in spite of flood, fire 
and earthquake. 

Presently we saw his face **was working with 
emotion" — we re-ally aren't Actionizing, there 
wouldn't be any point to it if we were; his face 
was ''working with emotion." And he saw that 
we had seen it work with emotion, and held 
out the book toward us and said: 

''Did you ever read Harold Bell Wright?" 

We said we had. 

He gave us a look that said: "Ah, then we 
are friends and brothers ! Let us wander, con- 
versationally, through the broad demesne 
where Harold reigns as king." 

We tried to return the same sort of glance ; 
felt that we had not quite succeeded, and made 
a gallant effort to retrieve ourself with the 
remark : 

"What you like abbut him is his Moral 
Sweetness, isn't it?'* 

"Yes," he said. "He gets himself into his 
178 



Preface to Novels of Harold Bell Wright 

books. My uncle knew him when he was a 
boy. ..." 

We got it all, with dates and details. We are 
sorry that we can't remember it. But it would 
have been impolite to take notes. We got Har- 
old's biography. This proud young man's fam- 
ily had known Harold from infancy. 

Even in his cradle Harold had shown his 
Moral Worth. There were bumps on his head 
that indicated that his future would be no or- 
dinary one. He learned his letters with a con- 
sciousness that the English language would one 
day be a valued assistant in his task of Reform- 
ing Men through Literature. He saw Spiritual 
Significance in the multiplication table and Pur- 
pose in geography. He was a good boy; but 
he was more than a good boy; he bore himself 
with the consciousness that he would fail moral- 
ly if he were so selfish as to keep his goodness to 
himself. . . . He was an Influence in his teens. 

Once the proud young man's uncle met Har- 
old on a lake steamer. Our memory is treach- 
erous, but we think that at the moment Harold 
was being a deckhand. The uncle had not seen 
179 



Prefaces 



him for several years. Harold, we gathered, 
was probably the most moral and godly deck- 
hand who ever sailed our great inland seas. All 
the temptations that are almost hourly thrown 
in the way of deckhands he resisted resolutely; 
he set his firm jaws and determined that he 
would not succumb to the snares set for the feet 
of the deckhand; the glittering palaces of lux- 
ury and pride which had softened the moral 
fiber of so many deckhands Harold never en- 
tered. The uncle was heartened by the talk 
with Harold. 

Years pass by . . . the uncle meets Harold 
again . . . not now a deckhand but a force in 
literature . . . but the same old Harold . . . 
not proud nor haughty . . . and, mark you. 
Wealthy. As we have said and sung so often, 
it is Moral Worth that gets the Mazuma. 

And after our talk with the young man whose 
uncle knew Harold from boyhood we realized 
more completely than ever before why we could 
never get rich quick writing a Harold Book. 
We don't have that kind of Moral Earnest- 
ness. And it can't be faked. 
180 



Preface to a Book of 
Statistics 



Preface to a Book of Statistics 

Statistics have always pleased us. They 
thrill us. There is something romantic about 
them. They scratch and tickle our imagination 
till it wakes and yodels. A fact is a fact; an 
idea is merely an idea. Facts and ideas move 
on prescribed planes from which they cannot 
escape. But statistics do not necessarily have 
any close connection with either facts or Ideas. 
At will they skip over the boundary Into a 
sort of fourth dimensional land. And there 
they dance like the motes one sees if one stares 
at the wind long enough so that the little veins 
in one's eyes become congested with blood cor- 
puscles. There is always the doubt as to wheth- 
er the little motes are really flickering and danc- 
ing up and down a slanting current of sunlit 
air or whether they are in the eyes. This doubt 
makes it a charming occupation to sit and watch 
183 



Prefaces 



them gambol on spring mornings when one 
should be at work. 

It is so with statistics; we like to wonder 
about them; we look at them and thrill and 
speculate and doubt and conjecture. But it is 
no joy to us to know what statistics are about. 
We do not wish to have them tied down to any 
specific subject. We love to see them dart and 
frolic through the pages of great tomes just for 
the sake of the dance itself. 

When we discover that during the first six 
months of 19 12 the United States of America 
exported 1,395)683 we do not care to know i,- 
395,683 what. It might be codfish, it might be 
pigs of iron; but what is that to us? Definite- 
ness stops the dance ; it gives us images too bold 
and concrete; it robs us of the fanqr of 1,395,- 
62>2 little motes whirling and swarming as they 
rise from the coast and fly out across the Atlan- 
tic with a pleasant whir and hum of multitudi- 
nous wings. 

As these 1,395,683 approach the Gulf Stream 
perhaps they meet 2,965,355 of imports coming 
westward. It would only ruin the picture if we 
184 



Preface to a Book of Statistics 

knew 2,965,355 what. It would give us some- 
thing to think about; we might become con- 
vinced of the plausibility of some one's economic 
theory, perhaps, and our day would be spoiled. 

Statistics, for us, fall naturally into various 
colors. For instance, 7,377,777, whether it 
stands for imports or exports, is undoubtedly 
red. But 1,019,901 is a pale, light, cool, gray- 
ish blue. And can any one doubt that S'^S^SSSr 
S^S'>SSS is of a bright aggressive yellow color, 
and gives off a high pitched note from the rapid 
motion of its myriad pinions? There is some- 
thing querulous and peevish and impatient about 
S'^S->SSS'>SSS^SSS') too; we shall not admit it into 
the volume of statistics which we are compiling. 

Hitherto there has been a science of statis- 
tics, but no art. That is, no avowed art. We 
suspect that certain advanced statisticians really 
approach the subject as we do, joyfully and all 
unshackled. But they pretend to be staid and 
dry and sober. They have respectable positions 
in the community to maintain. After compiling 
several pages of statistics full of sound and 
color, just for the sheer glee of reveling In sen- 
185 



Prefaces 



satlon, they become cowards and conceal their 
glee ; they write industrial and financial and so- 
ciological articles around their lovely tables and 
twist them into proving something important. 
They conceal their art, they muffle and smother 
their finer impulses beneath a repellent cloak of 
science. They are afraid that their toys will be 
taken away from them if they play with them 
frankly, so they aflfect some sort of useful em- 
ployment. 

We remember reading somewhere, and it was 
cited as an example of the mental twilight of the 
Middle Ages, that learned clerks and doctors 
were accustomed to debate the question as to 
how many angels could stand on the point of a 
needle. But these medieval disputants were not 
stupid at all. They were quite right to be inter- 
ested in such things. They were wise enough 
to divorce statistics from reality utterly. Things 
of every sort — all the arts and philosophies — 
suffer to-day because we insist on connecting 
them with a trivial reality. We try to make 
them prove something. We try to set them to 
work. And definite proofs will always be tire- 
186 



Preface to a Booh of Statistics 

some, and work a thing to be escaped. People 
are not really enthusiastic about having things 
proved to them, or about working; they want to 
have a good time. And they are quite right, 
too. 

Once, In a country town, we heard one of the 
village loafers make a remark concerning a 
storekeeper that we have always remembered; 
It seems to fit in here. It was the custom, in win- 
ter time at least, to set a cigar box full of smok- 
ing tobacco on the counter near the stove, and 
those who came in to rest and get warm and 
wonder if It would be a late spring and tell smut- 
ty stories and fry their felt boots before the lire 
helped themselves to this tobacco without mon- 
ey and without price. The box was always re- 
ferred to as "the paupers' box." One Mr. 
Dash, a merchant, put a stop to the paupers' box 
in his store. Joe Blank, who had been filling 
his pipe from it for twenty years, arose and re- 
marked from the depths of his outraged being: 

"Hennery Dash, your soul is so small that if 
they was millions and millions of souls the size 
of yourn Into a flea's belly them souls would be 
187 



Prefaces 



so far apart they couldn^t hear each other if 
they was to holler/* 

Joe had the mind of a poet. A bungler 
would have said exactly how many millions of 
souls, would have stated their exact size and 
told just how far apart they were; but Joe left 
it vague and vast and infinitely small. A scient- 
ist would have said too much and spoiled it; 
not so the artist. 

Statisticians deal with precious, intangible 
stuff, with the flecks and atomies of faery — and 
how few of them dare rise to the full possibili- 
ties of their medium! They are merely foolish 
when they might so readily achieve insanity if 
they had but the courage to be themselves. 

There are, for instance, 1,345 statisticians in 
this land who would know, if they were laid end 
to end, that 4,988,898,888 is green in color, a 
deep, dark green. Yet they are all afraid to 
stand forth like men and say so; they are afraid 
of what people will think of them. They are 
obsessed with the belief that materials are sig- 
nificant, without stopping to reflect that, even 
188 



Preface to a Booh of Statistics 

were this so, significance would still remain Im- 
material. 

And even If we feel a chill of fear creeping 
over us — we dare not keep on in this vein any 
longer or some one will catch us and make a cir- 
culation manager for a newspaper out of us. 



Preface to a Moral Book of 
Arithmetic 





Preface to a Moral Book of 
Arithmetic 

The mathematical textbook to which this is 
intended as an introduction is not yet complet- 
ed; but when it is completed it will be different 
from any other treatise on arithmetic in the 
world. It will have no very large numbers in 
it, for very large numbers are not only vulgarly 
ostentatious in themselves (and therefore of- 
fensive to persons of taste) but they are im- 
moral as well. 

There will be a good many 7*s in it and a good 
many 3's. Sevens and 3's are attractive num- 
bers. But there will be few 8^s and no more 6's 
than are absolutely necessary. The figure 6 does 
not please the eye when written, nor does the 
word six please the ear when spoken. Five is an 
excellent number and 5 is a quaint and not repel- 
193 



Prefaces 



lent figure; 4 does very well; i is often impres- 
sive; 2 is always insignificant; o, which Is the 
gateway to the fourth dimension, deserves a 
separate treatise for that reason. And there is 
a kind of elegance about o. But It is too much 
removed from life; there is no passion about 
it, somehow. We can admire o ; we can wonder 
at It; we could never love It, nor sin for Its sake ; 
neither would it regenerate us; It is lacking in 
heat and humanity. 

But 7 satisfies us, poetically and as a man. 
It has been well called the Perfect Number: all 
times, all climes, all peoples, all literatures, 
have attempted to utter the mystic and unutter- 
able virtues of 7. There are Seven Pleiads and 
Seven Sutherland Sisters, Seven Hells and Sev- 
en Candles; from the Old Testament to Dun- 
sany's "Gods of the Mountain" It has been in- 
voked to impress us, for it Is strangely and In- 
herently Impressive. The heavens declare its 
glory and the external and material world falls 
naturally Into heptagonal patterns . . . natu- 
rally, or magically ! For it is a magic number. 
Verse written on a rhythmic scheme which re- 
194i 



Preface to a Moral Book of Arithmetic 

gards the occult properties of seven is better 
than any other verse ; and queer things happen 
in a seven handed poker game that we have 
never seen happen anywhere else. 

Personally, we never had anything but good 
luck in our life, and we feel that we always shall 
be lucky, and that is because there are seven 
letters in our last name; and when we die, at 
the age of 105, we shall go and dwell for a 
while on the planet Saturn, which is ringed witH 
seven rings, each ring being of a gorgeous 
color; and we shall wear a wonderful coat of 
the seven primary colors and twang a seven- 
stringed harp, and to the measured twanging 
of that harp all the people we didn't like will be 
compelled to jump through and over those 
rings. This is no random prophecy, we should 
state; it was settled ages ago; it cost us two dol- 
lars, if remembrance does not fail, to learn our 
destiny, and the black-browed lady to whom we 
paid the money — her name was Isis, she said, 
and she was once an Egyptian princess — also 
added that we would travel a great deal and it 
might be well for us to beware of a dark 
195 



Prefaces 



gentleman. We intend to take Isis up more in 
detail when we write our ^'Preface to a Dream 
Book.'* 

But this (though It thrills us) is too personal, 
perhaps, to be widely interesting. Our own 
private superstitions, and mere questions of 
taste, and speculations concerning magic, would 
not of themselves have been sufficient to induce 
us to write our new arithmetic. 

There are, as we have hinted, Moral reasons 
for the Work. It is an Arithmetic With a Pur- 
pose. It is an Arithmetic from which large 
numbers will be excluded; it is an Arithmetic 
which is intended to be the beginning of a prop- 
aganda against large numbers. 

For large numbers have an odd effect upon 
the mind of man. Briefly and bluntly, they 
make him wicked. They seduce his spirit into 
all manner of vainglory and irreverence and 
megalomania. A statesman sees that his coun- 
try has a population of 16,304,129 persons, 
and he pores over the figures until they Induct 
him by an evil magnetism Into dreams of armies 
196 



Preface to a Moral Book of Arithinetic 

and conquest and empire. A bank clerk reads 
that Croesus was worth $86,924,066.29, and he 
wrecks his life and perhaps his country trying 
to get twice as much; a sheepherder discovers 
that Norval fed 868,466 sheep upon the Gram- 
pian Hills and is no longer a simple shepherd, 
but a fevered lunatic burning with the notion 
that he must become the Napoleon of the Mut- 
ton Chop ; a scientist finds that a brother scien- 
tist has counted 138,748,666 germs clinging to 
the .053071098th part of a square Inch of bron- 
chitis, and he sets out to discover or Invent a 
disease that will assay a billion bacilli to the 
square Inch, using up hundreds of guinea pigs 
in the process. Large numbers exert a malign 
Influence upon the imagination; something un- 
social and sinister and detached from reality 
and demoniac steals out of them like a vapor 
to corrode and corrupt the pink and Innocent 
convolutions of the brain. At one period the 
theologians very nearly let the world go to the 
devil because they got so busy disputing how 
many angels could stand on the point of a 
197 



Prefaces 



needle, and they were perfectly well-meaning 
theologians at that.* 

The case is stated very clearly in the Bible. 
Certain leaders among the Jews wanted to num- 
ber the people. God told them not to. He 
knew what would happen. They would become 
so excited looking at the large numbers that 
they would get some wicked notion about falling 
on neighboring States and subjugating them. 
And when Providence told them not to, they 
did it anyhow; and, if we remember rightly, 
the result was that they brought down some 
sort of a pestilence upon themselves. 

But it is useless to multiply examples. A 
casual glance through the history of the world 
is enough to convince any open-minded person 
that large numbers looked at too long have been 
primarily responsible for the ruin of all the in- 
dividuals and commonwealths that have ever 
been ruined. In our new Arithmetic more stress 
will be laid upon the Esthetic and Moral 

* It is true that we have taken another view of these 
theologians in another Preface . . . but that was in an- 
other Preface. Ideas change color according to the com- 
pany they keep. 

198 



Preface to a Moral Booh of Arithmetic 

Value of such numbers as the student Is encour- 
aged to copimune with, In their natural condi- 
tion, than upon what might happen If those 
numbers were added or subtracted or multi- 
plied. A few simple astronomical calculations 
will be permitted for the convenience of mari- 
ners. But astronomy Is a subject we Intend to 
take up in a more thorough way when we write 
our essay to be entitled "A Preface to Dr. 
Harter's Almanac.'* 



Preface to a Book JVithheld 




Preface to a Book Withheld 

The book to which this Is the preface will never 
get Into type. It consists, or would have con- 
sisted, of some eighteen hundred jests, short 
poems, anecdotes, etc., which have been con- 
sidered too daring, on the whole, for newspaper 
publication. The "art form" known as the Lim- 
erick predominates. 

We do not wish It to be inferred that there Is 
anything actually ribald In these jests and 
rhymes. Swift would have thought them slow; 
and they would have lacked the pep to 



.fill 



The spicy times of great Elizabeth 
With sounds that echo still. 



Most of them contain, we aver, more wit than 
Boccaccio's ^'Decameron"; they are more chaste 
than Balzac's *'Droll Stories"; they are more 



Prefaces 



delicate than Smollett; they are mare candidly 
what they are than the equivocal Sterne. 

We fling them into the waste paper basket, 
after having considered some of them almost 
daily for two or three years, with a sigh; we do 
not quite dare to publish them in a newspaper 
which may finally line the pantry shelves and 
come to the attention of some young Finnish 
cook with an unformed mind; after all, we must 
try to be, in our modest way, a guardian of 
public taste; in thousands of homes to-day the 
young of both s-x-s are getting their first impres- 
sions of life and literature from the editorial 
pages, Heaven help them! We must practice 
the circumspection which Caesar recommended 
to his wife. (Parenthetically, we must suppose 
Caesar's wife to have been a woman of great 
generosity. He said, "Caesar's wife must be 
above suspicion." And she forbore to answer, 
"Yes, Julius, and that will be easier for me than 
for you. I have never traveled in Egypt.") 

We fling these contributions away; but the 
world has missed something. 

Some of them are so triumphantly respectable 
204 



Preface to a Booh Withheld 

— In spite of your wicked mind ! Some of them 
are so discreet ! Some of them skate with such 
composure over such thin Ice ! Some of them 
smile at you with such demure Innocence up to 
the point at which you begin to smile at them I 
We give you our word, there Is scarcely one of 
them you would not enjoy and repeat If our 
sternly puritanical cast of mind did not deny 
them to you. 

There Is, for Instance, the one which goes : 

There was a young fellow from Frisco 
Who never had eaten Nabisco 



the risk, OI 



Truly, It is a harmless thing. It would not 
shock us were we the dean of a theological semi- 
nary. If you took a girl to the play and it was 
repeated on the stage she would not, necessarily, 
feel called upon to rush from the place and re- 
port it to her mother. We have been on the 
verge of printing It In its entirety a dozen times 
these last two years . . . and yet, now, we are 
205 



Prefaces 



too cowardly and conservative. We compro- 
mise that we may remain . . . uncompromised. 
How can we be quite sure what construction 
might have been put upon the interesting lines 
omitted if we had not omitted them? 

We live in an age so remarkably pure, be- 
cause it is so frequently reformed whether it 
likes it or not, that our apprehension of the 
iniquity in the minds of others has become 
almost abnormally acute. And we fear that all 
those others who may not have iniquity in their 
minds may have the same over-sharp perception 
of iniquity that we have. This makes us finical. 
This makes us cling tightly to appearances. 
This makes us discard many a pretty little trifle 
that Rabelais would not have hesitated over for 
an instant. 

There is an anecdote, which goes : 

"An Irishman named Pat, upon being asked, 

*Do ?' replied, with a flash of 

Celtic wit, 'No, yer honor, but ' " 

The thing is as essentially happy and charm- 
ing as the limerick which preceded it. But we 
will say no more about it. Enough that we are 
206 



Preface to a Book Withheld 

at one with our era and have the keen, censo- 
rious rectitude which condemns all these 
sprightly chirrupers to silence. 

It will not have escaped our readers that in 
calling attention to our suppression of this book 
we have also called attention to our own nice 
morality. Many will incline to the opinion that 
we might better have suppressed it and said 
nothing about the suppression. There is much 
to be said for that opinion. But such reticence 
is out of fashion, and we are too thoroughly 
in sympathy with present times and present 
manners to seem to criticize them by affecting 
a superiority to them. We suppress the book 
and we call attention to the suppression in or^ 
der that our virtue may be known to all men. 
The points of taste and ethics involved in this 
policy are many and we hope to treat them more 
adequately when we write our ^'Preface to the 
Report of a Committee for the Suppression of 
Literature.*' 

More than that; we are seeking for a par- 
ticular job and we take this means of advertis- 
ing our fitness for it. We wish the job of edit- 
207 



Prefaces 



ing and rewriting all the world's great literary 
masterpieces so that they will be acceptable to 
all the organizations and Individuals that are 
now a bit suspicious of them because they are 
masterpieces. And unless we announce our suit- 
ability for the task, how shall it ever become 
known? 

Just another quotation from the slain book 
before we reluctantly drop the last leaf of it 
into the waste basket: 

There was a young fellow named • . • 



Innocuous, we swear I Innocent as the snow- 
white hair that trembles underneath the halo of 
a saint! 

And yet, could we trust you with It? 

For Its Innocence Is of that sort of awakened 

Innocence which Is not by any means Ignorant; 

its innocence moves daintily and delicately on 

the blushing feet of knowledge past a little area 

208 



Preface to a Booh Withheld 

of less harmless sophistication, shrinking and 
mincing as the danger is avoided. One joggle 
from a thought less generously obtuse and the 
poem's pink toes might be stained. 

We consign it to oblivion rather than that it 
should be misunderstood 1 



Preface to Hoyt 'j Rules 




'Preface to Hoyfs Rules 

In introducing this compilation of rules I must 
confess to a certain disappointment that the 
guiding principles of the game of Shark Loo 
have been omitted. 

If there is no such game, then I am forced" 
to the conclusion that an aged nautical gentle- 
man whom I met some years ago in the vicinity 
of a seamen's home on Staten Island is a per- 
son to be distrusted. He was the only person 
I ever encountered who smoked a pipe and 
chewed tobacco at the same time, and the veins 
on the backs of his hands were very blue and 
very knotty, and in his mild and faded eye 
there was a milky innocence. 

His father before him had been a seafaring 
man (he said), and in the thirties of the last 
century had been cast away upon the coast of 
213 



Prefaces 



Borneo, among the Dyaks. These Dyaks were 
not persons whom his father (who was a fastid- 
ious man) would voluntarily have chosen as his 
associates. His father (who was an alert man) 
observed that they were great gamblers. His 
father (who was a natural born leader) speed- 
ily acquired great influence among the Dyaks, 
and (because his father was a pious man) en- 
deavored to make them stop gambling. 

His father succeeded (for his father was a 
persuasive man) in making his Dyaks promise 
to give up every gambling game except one. 
This game his father (who had an inventive 
turn of mind) named Shark Loo. It was a 
variation (so his father, a man always inter- 
ested in games of chance in a purely scientific 
way, told him) of Fly Loo. In playing Fly 
Loo each gambler contributes a coin to a pool; 
each gambler is provided with a lump of sugar; 
tTiese lumps of sugar are arranged in a row; the 
gamblei upon whose lump of sugar a fly first 
perches takes the pool. The Dyak version (my 
informant's father was shocked to note) con- 
sisted In trussing up Chinese pirates (who In- 
214 



Preface to Hoyfs Rules 



fested those coasts and were frequently cap- 
tured by the Dyaks) to the ends of long bam- 
boo poles, and letting them Into the sea off the 
ends of wharves and boat landings. The Dyak 
whose Chinese pirate first attracted a shark won 
the pool. This sport, which his otherwise do- 
cile Dyaks would on no account give up, so 
wrought upon my informant's father (who was 
a humane man) that he eventually left Borneo, 
or he might otherwise have founded a dynasty 
there, and my Informant might have been King 
of Borneo at the present day. 

If you wish further Information from the 
Rightful Heir to the Throne of Borneo (as 
his father, who died a melancholy and disap- 
pointed man, always called him) look for an 
old gentleman In whose eye of faded blue there 
dwells a milky innocence. 

He had once been cast away, he told me, on 
an island off the coast of South America; and 
for years he had nothing to eat but cockatoos 
and monkeys. This diet had had a surprising 
effect upon him . . . but this part of the Pref- 
ace seems to fall naturally Into rhyme : 
215 



Prefaces 



As I was passing the Seamen's Rest 

There skipped across the street 
A sailor who screamed like a cockatoo 

And used his hands for feet. 

"Now, wherefore, mariner," quoth I, 

"Confuse the foot and hand? 
And why you crew like a cockatoo 
, I cannot understand." 

Then he swung himself from a fire-escape, 
And he hung there easy and free 

Like a tropical monk from a pine tree trunk, 
And he spun this yarn to me: 

*'On the Reuben Ranzo I set sail, 
And I was the larboard mate, 

And a nautical guy you will never spy 
More orderly nor sedate; 

"I never used my feet for hands, 

Nor yet my hands for feet, 
I never screamed like a cockatoo 

For biscuits for to eat. 

"But I eats as other humans does. 
And my tastes is nowise quaint, 

And I never springs no caudal swings 
With a tail which really ain't ; 

216 



Preface to Hoyfs Rules 



"But I drinks my grog and I stands my watch, 

And I cats my normal duff, 
And I was engaged for to marry a gal 

Which her name was Nancy Huff; 

"But the Reuben Ranzo hooked herself 
As she rambled around the Horn, 

And she foundered and sank on a lonely bank — 
A mournful coast forlorn ! 

"And I am alone in a jungle wild, 

And all I gets to eat 
Is cockatoos, and monks what use 

Their little hands for feet; 

"I mourns and mourns and I eats and eats 

Upon that sorrowful strand. 
Till a gradual doubt arises in me 

As to whether a foot is a hand; 

"I eats and I eats, and I mourns and mourns — 
And my beard like feathers grew, 

And my nose to a peak like a parrot's beak. 
And I screamed like a cockatoo; 

"And I eats and eats, and I mourns and mourns 

Till a ship sails over the blue — 
Which they lassos me from a cocoanut tree 

And sells me into a Zoo; 

£17 



Prefaces 



"Alas for love! My Nancy seen 

Me frolicking in my cage 
And all of her love turns into scorn, 

And she says to me in rage: 

" *I never will marry a man who screams 

With a voice like a cockatoo! 
Nor a man who swings from bars and rings — 

You are changed, you are changed — adieu !' " 

And I left him alone with his grief, and passed 

Sadly along the street; 
But I flung him some peanuts to pay for his tale — 

And he picked them up with his feet. 

If you should meet with the Rightful Heir 
to the Throne of Borneo, listen to him with a 
seemly reverence, for (like his father before 
him) he is a sensitive man. 



Preface to the Diary of a 
Failure 




Preface to the Diary of a Failure 

The gentleman who wrote this Diary and 
asked us to furnish an introduction for it, ad- 
vises us that there are a great many lies in it. 

They were necessary, he explains, in order 
that the protagonist of the drama might con- 
tinue to command the sympathy of the author. 

And he has adopted the proper method of 
approach, in our opinion. We have known him 
for years; he has just put his autobiography 
into our hands; the book exhales himself; it 
smacks and smells of his personal flavor and 
aroma ; the book and the man are of a piece. 

And he has attained this unity of himself 
with his utterance through a conscientious falsi- 
fication of the mere brute facts of his external 
life. 

In order to write a thousand pages a man 



Prefaces 



must keep enthusiastic concerning the subject 
of his narrative; and if the subject is himself 
he will scarcely be able to draw the material 
for this continuing enthusiasm from what he 
has actually done so largely as from what he 
should have done and what he intended to do. 

Perhaps a quotation from the Diary itself 
will assist In illustrating our friend's literary 
method. The following sentences are from 
Chapter 24: 

"I never argued with my wife's mother nor 
answered any of her fantastic accusations; and 
on this occasion I told her courteously, but 
with finality, that while it was not true that 
I had set fire to the sheets and to her daughter's 
night clothing by smoking in bed, yet it would 
be none of her affair had I really done so, and 
I Insisted upon my right to smoke at any hour 
and in any place that pleased me. I added 
that in case she was not prepared to acquiesce 
in this I would be compelled to leave her house 
at once, taking my wife and the five children 
with me; and I told her plainly that if I were 
forced to this radical step she need not expect 
222 



Preface to the Diary of a Failure 

to be a welcome visitor in whatever home it 
might be my fortune to establish. My wife's 
mother broke down and wept at this, with- 
drew her unjust charges and begged me to stay 
and use her humble house as my own until 
such time as I should be solicited to accept some 
employment compatible with my talents and 
dignity. I finally consented to forgive her and 
remain, but I warned her, too, that she must 
see to it In the future that the boarders treated 
me with more consideration . . .'' 

Grossly speaking, our friend lied. 

The facts were that he confessed to having 
smoked his pipe in bed, setting fire to the covers 
and burning his wife, who ran through the cor- 
ridors of the boarding house, between a double 
row of alarmed guests, screaming, and with 
a screaming baby in her arms, to her mother's 
room. The mother ordered the author of the 
Diary from the house at once ; himself, his wife 
and his two older children pleaded with the 
old lady until daybreak before she would relent 
and allow him to remain. 

Grossly speaking, we say, our friend lied. 



Prefaces 



But the world should learn to speak and judge 
more gently and more truthfully. 

The facts, our friend felt, did not represent 
him. His body dwelt in that house, among 
brawling relatives-in-law, uninteresting children 
of whom he happened to be the father, and 
jeering boarders — but that was not the truth 
about the man as he knew himself; his soul, 
his essential ego, lived otherwhere, beyond the 
accidents of fate and untouched by the insults 
of chance and circumstance. Should he not be 
true to his soul, which was of a quality that re- 
jected such scenes as false to itself, automatic- 
ally expunging all that was alien to it? 

Had he related the mere physical facts he 
would have lied about his spirit, that eternal 
thing; but with a superior honesty he chose to 
deny the irrelevant, the material, the temporal. 

There are two sorts of truth about all of us. 
There Is that which the world sees, and that 
which we know. Our deeds, which are known 
to all men, too often appear to us to be strange, 
inexplicable libels on ourselves. 

They are the falsehoods told about us by life. 
SIM 



Preface to the Diary of a Failure 

And should we begin to accept them as the 
truth, we are dead spiritually. For if we do 
not feel to-day stronger and more courageous 
and more moral than we were yesterday — than 
the accidents of yesterday mendaciously made 
us out to be — how shall we be able to face to- 
morrow? 

The great lesson is to forgive yourself. 

These diaries that we are always writing — 
let us steadfastly believe that the point of view 
in them Is the same as that adopted by the Re- 
cording Angel. 

Look at each day and say, this Is another 
day ! My sin and sloth and foolishness of yes- 
terday I utterly repudiate. It was not I. My 
soul did not do that nor consent to It. I was 
caught In a corner by circumstance, and clubbed 
into doing this or that — but the deed does not 
represent me; I am something better to-day, 
I will be something better to-morrow. 

This Is another day I — shall we cloud the 
new dawn o'er with a mist of sighs and useless 
regrets? Let us forgive our own trespasses, 
as we forgive them that trespass against us. 
^25 



Foreword to a Literary 
Censor'* s Autobiography 





Foreword to a Literary Censor s 
Autobiography 

The gentleman who has written the tale of 
his life at length in this volume is employed by 
a Vice Commission to ferret out obscenities in 
works of art. In our estimation he is doing a 
most important work. 

Censors are necessary, increasingly neces- 
sary, if America is to avoid having a vital lit- 
erature. There is a knocking at the gate. The 
artist is knocking at the gate. If he gets in he 
will report to us what we already know — that 
Duncan has been murdered. And if the artist 
reports life to us as it is, and as we all know 
It to be . . . well, that would be too frightful 
to contemplate! 

If we are to continue entirely comfortable 
229 



Prefaces 



we must escape the truth by crucifying all those 
who come bearing witness to it. 

The gentleman whose book we introduce has 
a charming mind. Thoroughly to appreciate 
it, one must read the entire volume which he 
has produced. But he has a kind of prologue 
and epitome of his own, which gives a glimpse 
of it; our note and his prologue (which fol- 
lows) are sufficient introduction: 

I showed an inclination towards my Life 
Work at a very early age. 

I could not have been more than ten years 
old when I reported to my Teacher at School 
that Myrtle Snodgrass, a little girl who sat 
in the next seat to me, had written a naughty 
word upon her slate. 

"How do you know it is a naughty word?'^ 
asked Teacher. 

''Because," I answered, "Myrtle Snodgrass 
jerked her slate away and would not let me read 
it." 

"Then you did not see it?" 

"No, ma'am." I have always been truthful. 



Foreword to a Censor's Autobiography 

*Terhaps," said Teacher, ''it was not a word 
at all. You have accused Myrtle of something 
that you cannot prove. It is you who have 
been naughty, Harold! You have no right to 
look at Myrtle's slate if she does not wish you 
to. And you have reported something you do 
not know to be true." 

I have always been persecuted in my efforts 
to safeguard the public morals. 

"Teacher," I said, "if it wasn't a naughty 
word, then it must have been a naughty pic- 
ture." 

"Why do you say that, Harold?" 

"Teacher, she had been showing her slate 
to Willie Simms and they had been laughing 
over it. And when I tried to see too she jerked 
it away." 

I still think my logic was unassailable, child 
though I was. I still believe that my deduc- 
tions were quite justified by the circumstances. 
For in the years since then I have had it borne 
in upon me, on many, many occasions, that 
words, phrases, allusions, which I cannot read- 
ily understand or which are deliberately hidden 
a31 



Prefaces 



from me, are usually capable of some construc- 
tion not altogether proper. It Is always safe 
to infer, when people refuse to explain to one, 
that their real and secret meanings will not bear 
explanation. 

I told my father, who was a member of the 
school board, that the teacher had scolded me 
for reporting something so naughty about a 
little girl that I did not like to go into details, 
and he took the matter up officially. 

Perhaps even then the Teacher would not 
have lost her position, but I was able to supply 
supplementary evidence which (my instinct told 
me even at that early age) tended to prove 
that this teacher was no fit person to form the 
minds of ingenuous little children. Arriving 
at the schoolhouse earlier than any of the other 
pupils one morning, and earlier than the 
Teacher herself, I found her desk unlocked. It 
was usually locked — a suspicious thing in itself, 
I felt. Naturally, finding it unlocked I ran- 
sacked it, in the interests of the public wel- 
fare . . . and, I may add, my father had sug- 
gested something of the sort. 
232 



Foreword to a Censor's Autobiography 

I found two damning photographs. Abom- 
inable pictures I One was the picture of 
Teacher herself, surrounded by several other 
young women, all in the abbreviated costume of 
the basket-ball team of a girls' college. This 
might not have been so bad in itself . . . though 
it is a sort of thing I do not approve . . . but 
near by was the photograph of a young man 
partially nude. He had on the costume of a 
college sprinter . . . nothing else I 

The Teacher later told the school board that 
It was a picture of her brother. But, as my 
father pointed out, it might just as readily have 
been the photograph of some one to whom 
she was not related. And the relationship itself, 
my father justly said, counted for little against 
the impropriety of leaving such things where 
they were likely to fall Into the hands of inno- 
cent children such as his little son. 

Even then the majority of the school board 
were unwilling to dismiss Teacher on an out 
and out charge of improper conduct; but my 
father and some of his right thinking friends 
were strong enough in the community to get rid 



Prefaces 



of her on another charge. It was generally 
understood, however, that her services were 
really dispensed with because of some unnamed 
immorality . . . my father and his friends 
were too just and too merciful to relate the 
details pubHcly. I am proud and happy to 
testify that, because of the cloud under 
which she left our godly little city, this per- 
verter of the morals of childhood was never 
afterward able to obtain a position as a teacher. 
There was nothing definite ever published 
against her . . . but people generally seemed 
to feel, even as I, child that I was, had felt, 
that there must be something wrong some- 
where . . . something wrong. 

Something wrong! 

How often I have felt that! How unerr- 
ingly my soul has reacted to the aroma of evil ! 
I say it (not with worldly pride, for that is 
sinful, but with the satisfaction of the used and 
useful weapon in the holy war against iniquity) 
— I say with satisfaction that I have a sixth 
sense which directs me infallibly to the detec- 
tion of obscenity. 

234 



Foreword to a Censor's Autobiography 

Authors may talk of art, and chatter of its 
relation to life — ^they may prattle of truth and 
duty — but they cannot hide from me the carnal 
thought and the lascivious intention behind their 
specious innocence ! 

A thing is either pure or it is impure. My 
sixth sense informs me at once. No argument 
is necessary. My spirit is either shocked or it 
is not shocked. 

It is not necessary to understand art in order 
to condemn it. 

I love to sit In my library with the hundreds 
of books and pictures I have condemned about 
me and think that I have been of some use to 
my generation. In my mind's eye, as I run my 
physical eye over the book bindings, I can see 
the Improper passages quivering and glowing 
Inside the volumes. 

I know them all by heart! 

And I thrill agaln.to each one of them, with 
the same thrill I felt when I first discovered 
It and realized that I was about to render an- 
other service to society. I tremble, and at 
235 



Prefaces 



times my eyes fill with tears, as I repeat them 
aloud. 

And when I am gone my son will take 
up the work, I am proud to say. Only last 
night, as I crept down the basement stairs to 
the kitchen to listen at the door and make sure 
the housemaid was conducting herself properly 
with her young man, I stumbled over my son. 
He was already at the keyhole. I patted his 
head in the darkness and thanked heaven that 
I had been rewarded in such a child. I patted 
his head and kissed him on his white, young 
brow, his pure young brow, and we knelt to- 
gether there. 



Note to a Chapter on 
Journalism 




Note to a Chapter on Journalism 

Julian Street, In his book, ^'American Ad- 
ventures," devotes a chapter to Georgia journal- 
ism. There was one character connected with 
Georgia journalism fifteen years ago whom Mr. 
Street does not mention; but we remember him 
better than many a more Caucasian person. 

His name was Tusky Barnard, he was of a 
light chocolate color and was the Managing 
Janitor of the Atlanta News when we went to 
work there. 

Tusky named himself Managing Janitor. 
The Managing Editor of the paper had a 
strength — we will not say a weakness, for the 
habit had such a grip on him — for pasting little 
bulletins about this, that and the other thing 
239 



Prefaces 



all over the office. Tusky admired these bul- 
letins immensely, and presently began to put up 
bulletins of his own, which ran about like this : 

Pleas remember cleness is next to god- 
liness DOAN THROW CIGAR ENDS ON FLOOR BY 

order tusky barnard managing janitor. 
Pleas remember ladys is flours of the 

EARTH OFFIS BOYS DOAN SPIT ON FLOOR THEY 
GETS THEIR DRES IN IT BY ODOR TUSKY BAR- 
NARD MANAGING JANITOR. 

We made a collection of some twenty or 
more of Tusky's bulletins; but we have lost 
them and remember only four or five. 

We naturally supposed that Tusky's name 
was Tuskegee, and one day we asked him. But 
no. 

*'Mah gran'ma done name me," Tusky ex- 
plained. "Mah full name is Tuskyrory Bore- 
alis Bah'na'd, afteh a river whah mah gran'ma 
been bo'n." 

We gathered that there must have been some 
confusion in his mind of the Tuscarawas River 
with the Aurora Borealis, but it was a good 
240 



Note to a Chapter on Journalism 

name, and Tusky liked it all the better, he 
said, because It had a religious sound. 

"I'se a chu'ch niggah,'* he said. And he 
used to tell us how he had "come through.'* 

Tusky's conversion was very similar in man- 
ner to that of St. Paul. Tusky had been strug- 
gling — ^not to be converted, but to avoid con- 
version — for weeks. But the Spirit was hot 
on his trail — it dogged him, he said. (Just as 
the protagonist of Francis Thompson's poem, 
"The Hound of Heaven," is pursued.) Tusky 
was a "Free Thinkler"; and he was proud of 
being a "Free Thinkler"; because It made him 
different from the other negroes, but at the 
same time he was more than a little frightened 
by the Satanic eminence to which It raised him. 

One day, while a negro revival meeting was 
in full swing In his neighborhood, Tusky took 
to his bed, sick, a prey to conflicting emotions. 

"Mah bruddah an' mah sisteh'n law think 
hit's a sickness o' de flesh," Tusky told us, "but 
in mah hea't Ah knows it am a sickness of de 
sperrlt." 

He covered himself with blankets, he said, 



Prefaces 



for he had chills. One after another all the 
negroes prominently connected with the revival 
meeting visited him, and .prayed and exhorted 
beside his bed. 

*'But Ah laid dah an' I shivah an' I shivah," 
said Tusky, "an' Ah belt off de pruspahation. 
Ah had er thought ef de* pruspahation come de 
glory o' de Lawd would come erlong wiv it. 
An' Ah didn't want to lose de glory o' bein' a 
Free Thinkler. An' fob free days Ah laid on 
dat bed an' wrassle agin de Lawd, de prayin' 
gwine on ovah me all de time. An' yet, all de 
while, in mah hea't Ah was wishin' de pruspa- 
hation would start an' de Lawd would come." 

And, at the end of three days, so Tusky told 
us, the perspiration came. It was in the night 
that the perspiration came; there was a little 
sprinkle of snow on the ground — we are not 
sure but that Tusky staged the drama on Christ- 
mas Eve ; he was quite capable of it — and with 
the perspiration came a voice. 

"Hit am a Voice dat fill de whole Hebben 
and Ea'th," Tusky said, "an' hit holler out 
free times: 'Tuskyrory Bohealis, yo* Free 
242 



Note to a Chapter on Journalism 

Thinkler yo\^ Why puss acute me, nig g ah! 
Tuskyrory Bohealis, Free Thinkler, quit yo* 
pussacutin* me, niggahF '' 

Tusky rose, all covered with "pruspahatlon'* 
as he was, and staggered out Into the yard. 
And there he saw what St. Paul saw — a light; 
a great light In the sky. And he heard again 
the Voice that cried: '' Tuskyrory Bohealis, 
yo' Free Thinkler yo\ quit yo* pussacutin' me, 
niggahr^ 

He fell down, he used to tell us — and he 
told us the story regularly every Friday after- 
noon, which was pay day, and we always gave 
him a dime to go towards the purchase of a 
new Bible, as he said he had read his old one 
so hard It was about worn out — he fell down 
on the ground. In the snow, and lost conscious- 
ness. 

"When mahse'f came to mahse'f agin," he 
said, "dah Ah was, er layln' en de fros*, an* 
wiv nothin' ovah me but er bah'b-wlah fence. 
An' all de postes er dat fence had a ball er 
light onter de tops, an' de fiah was er runnin' 
back and fo'th erlong de wiahs er dat fence, 
243 



Prefaces 



f'om pos' ter pos\ an' de big Voice was er 
shoutin' f'om de ball's of flah once mo' : ^Tus- 
kyrory Bohealis, yo^ no ^ count Free Thinklin* 
niggah yo\ why does- yo^ puss acute mef ' 

"Ah jes' fotch er groan," Tusky would say, 
"an' all de Free Thinklln' hit pass out er me. 
An' Ah say, *Lawd, Lawd, ef yo' fo'glve me 
I'se gwlne fo' ter fo'glve you, and dey ain't 
no reason why we cain't get erlong togeddah 
in peace an' posterity f'om now on. Ef yo' 
take away yo' fiah Ah's gwine ter stop mah 
pussacutin'J" 

The fire vanished, as a sign that the bargain 
was acceptable, and Tusky went back into the 
house filled with a great peace, which, he said, 
had, "aboden" with him ever since. 



Foreword to a Miser'' s 
Autobiography 



Foreword to a Miser s Autobiography 

I AM dying, and after I am dead the news- 
papers will print little articles calling me a miser. 
But no one will find any gold about here. I 
have taken care of that. 

I have a scrap book filled with pieces which 
tell of the deaths of other men called misers. 
I know just what they will say of me, the news- 
papers ! Some of them will have editorials 
calling attention to my ''wasted life," and say- 
ing that even I got no enjoyment from it. 

The fools that write such things! — what do 
they know? 

What can any one who is not of that guild of 
rare souls, so coarsely miscalled by the world, 
ever know of the passionate secret romance of 
an existence such as mine has been? 

There is gold all about me here — one thou- 
sand and twenty-seven ten-dollar pieces, an even 
247 



Prefaces 



two thousand and ten of the double eagles, 
seven hundred and thirty-four live dollar pieces 
and five thousand of the ones, lacking just 
three. (Add it up — I know how much it comes 
to.) Each piece has its story, its little drama 
of human life, and maybe of death. And some 
of those stories I know, too. There are pieces 
that are like books with half the chapters gone 
to me; I know a little of the tale and I can 
finish it as I choose. No two gold pieces are 
alike any more than if they were people. 

I never cared for paper money or for silver, 
except to get it changed into gold. And I never 
cared much for jewels either. Land and gold 
are the two great realities. But I never wanted 
land. Land is stupid and slow, but gold is like 
blood and thought. 

I've had my coffin built, and it isn't like any 
one else's coffin. It is large; enormously large, 
and enormously heavy. Your spendthrift fools 
would call it an extravagance, but I have al- 
ways known when I got my money's worth. 

Heavy, it is, and built of steel. But the sides 
arc not solid. There is a space four inches 
248 



Foreword to a Miser s Autohiagraphy 

broad all around between the outer and inner 
skins of steel. After I fit the cunning panels 
shut it looks like solid steel. And when the 
gold goes between the outer and inner skins it 
will be heavy enough to fool them, too. 

For there is where the gold will be, and I 
will be in the midst of it, till I rise again. For 
I believe in the resurrection of the body, just 
as they say in church. And body means body. 

Some nights I put it all in there, big double 
handfuls at a time, and lie down in the coffin 
and pretend I am dead already. And I feel 
it pulsing and quivering behind the steel skin. 
The gold and I understand each other; we al- 
ways have. 

And sometimes I talk to It and it talks to me. 

*'I am the fine clothes you never wore,'* it 
says. "And the oysters and venison you never 
ate. And the wine and fancy drinks you never 
treated yourself to. And the women you never 
bought. Don't you wish you had spent me for 
those things? Eh?" 

And I laugh and rock and roll in the coffin, 
^49 



Prefaces 



and that sets the gold to clinking as if it were 
laughing, too. 

We understand each other. 

It warms me and thrills me; it beats like 
blood through the coffin and through me, and 
it will go on beating like blood all the years I 
lie dead in the midst of it until I rise again and 
get my golden harp and golden crown. For I 
never did anything bad, and they are coming 
to me. 

It is all the fine clothes and the fancy drinks 
and the women, the gold is. It is the essence 
of them. It is the blood of the world. Fools 
spend gold for such things, and have them only 
for a moment. I denied myself, and I have the 
essence of them forever. I used to think, some- 
times, that I would startle the town some night 
with a big splurge, just to laugh at the idiots 
who thought and said I didn't know how to 
enjoy life. A thousand times I planned what 
I would do. And every time I planned it I got 
as much out of it as if I'd really done it. And 
gradually I came to see that that was where 
the real enjoyment lay — in the power to cut 
250 



Foreword to a Miser's Autohiagraphy 

loose if I wanted to. And then I understood 
that the essence and the spirit of it all are in 
the gold. 

But most people are too crude to get their 
pleasure out of savoring the essence and aroma 
of a thing. But I have, and that way IVe 
saved my body from contamination, and I've 
saved my soul from sin, and I've had all the 
essence of it, too, and I've got the gold by me 
yet, into the bargain. 

And it will be with me till the last trump 
blows over land and sea and the dead arise. 
Arise in the body, mind you. And body means 
body. And golden crowns are golden crowns. 
If anything else had been meant it would have 
been easy enough to say so. 

I've lived life to the full. IVe been right 
in the blood of life, handled it and measured 
it and washed and rolled in it. And it makes 
me chuckle to think of the writers who pity 
misers! Don't pity me I Happy I've lived 
and happy I will die, and happy I will rise 
again from the dead with all my gold about me 
and go up to get my promised crown. 
«51 



Preface to a Check Book 




Preface to a Check Book 

For years we cultivated a pleasing confusion 
concerning how much money we had. Con- 
sulting the stubs in our check book did us no 
good. We never kept it properly balanced. 

Pleasing confusion, we say. The hazy un- 
certainty pleased us because we were that kind 
of an ass; we affected an attitude with regard 
to money. Many young men who are trying 
to be artists of one sort or another do affect an 
attitude. They find something fine and dash- 
ing in spending a week's salary in a few hours; 
they will be half-starved for days; they con- 
sider that rather interesting also. It sets them 
apart (they think) from their more colorless 
brethren. They lend and borrow easily; in 
their own conceit they are exhibiting a gener- 
ous scorn of material things, rebuking the gross 
earth, establishing kinship with the more ethe- 
real element. 

255 



Prefaces 



But money is life. Not material life only. 
It touches the soul. Who steals our purse 
steals not trash, but our blood, time, muscle, 
nervous force, our power to help others, our 
future possibility of turning out creditable 
work. 

He may even steal our good name ; there are 
not wanting instances where innocent men 
might have cleared themselves if they had had 
the money or the credit to command events. 

Men are dying in bitterness and in the 
shadow of disgrace for want of a little gold. 
If a thief robs us we may be able to under- 
stand why he does it, but smite him we will not 
forbear to do for all of that. He has aimed 
a dagger at our heart and swung a bludgeon at 
our head; he strikes at our life who grasps at 
our dollars; it is our blood or his. 

But we don't think we would imprison the 
thief. Even crooked bankers and all others 
who pick the pockets of the poor, turning the 
bodies and souls, the blood and hopes of their 
thousands of struggling victims into gold — even 
them we would not have imprisoned. They 
256 



Preface to a Chech Booh 



should be beheaded or shot. Not hanged, nor 
killed by electricity. Hanging is too often done 
by bungling stranglers. And when a man is 
killed by electricity — what doctor surely knows 
that there are not some moments of intense 
agony between the initial shock and death, dur- 
ing which the being is submerged in a bath of 
flame? None of the doctors who deny this has 
ever been killed by electricity. But beheading 
is instant death. The French have preserved 
the truly civilized feeling about this matter. If 
it is determined that a man should die, that man 
is already dead; he has acquired a certain dig- 
nity through his death; it is a ghastly impro- 
priety to risk letting him suffer any more than 
is necessary; he has a right to depart quickly 
and painlessly — to depart tragically, with none 
of the writhings of mere melodrama. 

It is possible that it is not right to kill people 
at all; that view has been held sincerely for a 
long time by many people. But if any deserves 
death it is certainly the thief on a large scale 
who ruins so many lives. When he loots a 
bank men who have saved and struggled for 
257 



Prefaces 



years give up hope, growing children lose the 
chance for education; this, that or the other 
girl may be forced into* prostitution; youths 
who have been striving and suffering and over- 
working againsit the time when they might 
learn a profession or an art or a business are 
flung back into the slums; talent is crushed; 
maybe, now and then, even genius is blasted. 
The hand of the thief reaches into the in- 
wards of society and filches the stuff of life. 
The future is impoverished of the soul that 
would have come to bloom. 

The essential sin of the thief is that he can- 
not rob humanity without robbing God; these 
worlds, these stars on which we dwell, need 
more life of a better quality; great men help 
God create; a thief is a rat in the granary 
which holds the seeds of heaven; money,. prop- 
erly come by and properly used, is a sacred 
thing. An honest financier, who really serves 
the world, may be something of a priest. 

The serious artist, if he is to commune with 
Heaven, must, above all men, have leisure here 
on earth. And leisure, that is money. The 
258 



Preface to a Check Book 



priest, the prophet, must have leisure. He 
must have freedom. He must have time for 
reflection. Christ told a certain rich young 
man: *'Sell all thou hast and follow me." He 
meant, follow me Into freedom, into, leisure, 
into immortality, away from your worldly pre- 
occupation, from the worries that clutter up 
your life. 

Christ and His disciples found freedom, lei- 
sure, time for reflection, by avoiding manual 
labor and depending on their friends for physi- 
cal support. But some one did the work on 
which they lived; those friends were In a finan- 
cial position to help along a little; Christ did 
not scorn money honestly come by; He used 
it; He lived for months on the thrift of those 
friends; their thrift, their money, helped that 
rare soul to show Heaven to Earth; with di- 
vine assurance He marched forward, confident 
that whatever of the material world He needed 
would be forthcoming; that the stuff of life 
which He required lay in store for him. 

But we have no such assurance; we have no 
miracle of loaves and fishes to fall back upon; 
259 



Prefaces 



me are not divine vagabonds; we have nothing 
but our human thrift. We cannot get leisure 
to think or write or paint or worship by turn- 
ing actual vagrants; the real vagrant to-day is 
extremely unromantic and excessively harassed. 
We have no regal presence to command food, 
shelter and time. 

Therefore, coin must be ours. 

Money is a spiritual thing. Ass that we were 
— who used to pride ourself secretly on a cer- 
tain loose attitude toward our check book I 
What good, we would like to know, did draw 
poker or poetry ever do us? If we had let 
poker and poetry alone in our youth we might 
now have the leisure to sit down and write a 
book instead of merely writing a preface. We 
think it might have turned into a book of ser- 
mons. 



Preface to the Autobiography 

of an Old-Fashioned 

Anarchist 



Preface to the Autobiography of an 
Old-Fashioned Anarchist 

The person to whose memoirs this note is a 
preface was a benign and fatherly being. 

He had a great tenderness for all humanity. 

*'When I was a young man, at the outset of 
my career,'* he sometimes said, "I used to think 
with regret of the many Innocent Bystanders 
endangered, and often killed, in the dynamiting 
I was engaged in for the advancement of the 
Cause. But as I grow older and observe more 
of the world's Injustice I have come to a dif- 
ferent way of thinking. Is It not a kindness 
to any man to remove him from this life? If 
he Is really innocent, if he is as yet uncon- 
taminated by his mundane environment, the 
greater Is the service I do him, the more disil- 
lusionment and suffering and despair I save 
him from. When I weep now it is for those 
who still live, for those beyond the reach of 
263 



Prefaces 



my activities, rather than for those who have 
been suddenly and mercifully launched upon 
eternity. Do you think that I myself would 
have consented to live for eighty-seven years 
had it not been for the consciousness of my 
Mission in the World?" 

This point of view indicates, I think, a na- 
ture truly and profoundly religious; it shows 
the sacrificial spirit. The Professor — his 
friends called him the Professor — felt that 
death was best for all men, himself included. 
But in spite of this wish to die he was willing 
to keep on living that he might bring death to 
others. He did not consult his own desires, 
he was guided by a higher thought, giving free- 
ly to his fellow men the boon of destruction 
which he denied to himself; he subdued his pri- 
vate inclination and did what he conceived to 
be his public duty sternly to the end, carefully 
avoiding the police and escaping the legal pen- 
alty for what the world would call his crimes. 

I say sternly; and stern he was in a sense; 
his moral parts were assembled about a stiff 
spine of austerity. But there was no vain ex- 
264 



Prefofe to Old-Fashioned Anarchist 

ternal parade of this quality; it was his sweet- 
ness that one perceived first and remembered 
longest. He even had a certain gentle whim- 
sicality of manner, knowing well that a sour 
aspect and a frowning habii are no essentials 
of true spiritual dignity, but may often accom- 
pany the reverse. Indeed, on the strong rock 
Of this nature there* grew and flourished many 
green and floral traits. It was, for Instance, 
his pleasantly eccentric custom, when he had 
achieved what our society calls an atrocity, to 
write a comic song about it (commonly in the 
early ballad -style) and chant it, to his own 
accompaniment on the piano, at some jolly 
party of his intimates. 

Young men especially loved him; and, while 
he was guide and inspirer to their develop- 
ing minds, he was fond of companioning them 
in -many of their genial pranks and lively vices. 
Simplicity and integrit7 were the foundations 
of his character, but he also had his subtleties 
and his flashes of psychic Insight; one day he 
emerged from a half trance of Introspection 
with this remark: '^Vice is necessary to an 
265 



Prefaces 



Idealist, otherwise he would soar too far above 
the world to which he bears his message; he 
would lose touch with it and understanding of 
it. I must go in more for Vice!" 

And he did, resolutely and on principle. At 
first he did not like it; later, he confessed, he 
loved It for its own sake. "Thus," he com- 
mented, with his winsome smile, combing his 
long white beard with his nervous fingers, "thus 
does Duty reward those who are steadfast by 
becoming Pleasure!" 

It is melancholy to have to record that a 
being so pure and unselfish died of a broken 
heart. But that is the world's way! He had 
grown old and feeble, and white-headed in the 
service of Anarchy — and in the end Anarchy 
pushed him aside! 

It was over a purely technical matter that 
he quarreled with his immediate superiors in 
the organization, but if the break had not come 
about in one way it would have come about In 
another: The Professoi held by the received 
traditions of Anarchy; he believed in a steady 
and sane advance along the road determined 



Preface to Old-FasMoned Anarchist 

in the past by the fathers of the cause. He 
was a classicist, a conservative — an academi- 
cian, as it were; he abhorred anything radical; 
the linked historical continuity of deed and deed 
was his ideal. I fear he was a trifle pedantic, 
as so many virtuous and sincere men are. 

"The kind of Anarchy that was good enough 
for my grandsire is good enough for me !'* he 
used to say. 

An ingenious but flighty young Anarchist, a 
clever lad but very disinclined to recognize au- 
thority, invented an Infernal Machine the ex- 
plosive principle of which was not dynamite 
and urged it upon the Professor at a meeting 
of the little group over which the old man pre- 
sided. 

It shocked the Professor to the soul. 

*'Never," he cried, *'has anything but dyna- 
mite been used since its first manufacture And 
it never shall be used while I retain command I 
It is against all the traditions of Anarchy I 
There is no precedent for it, young man. The 
proposal is impudent, subversive, revolutipn- 
aryr* 

«67 



Prefaces 



He was, I believe, called an obstructionist; 
but the old man made a bitter fight. He was 
finally thrown out of the organization, by- 
younger men in control, as insubordinate, obe- 
dience to law and discipline being one of the 
essentials of practical Anarchy. Or so I gather 
from the old man's book, to which I must refer 
you for the details of his struggle against the 
youthful leaders with their new ideas, for the 
story of his defeat and for the melancholy cry 
from his heart with which his volume concludes. 

I can never read it without tears. 



Preface to an Unpublished 
Volume 




Preface to an Unpublished Volume 

Some fifteen years ago, when we were work- 
ing for a paper down South, it was our habit 
to produce at least three poems a day. And 
what wonderful poems they were I All about 
the old gods, and love, and . . . and all that 
sort of thing. 

We can praise them, and there is no one to 
contradict us, for none of them was ever printed, 
and none of them ever will be. We believed 
in them, at the time, more than we have ever 
been able to believe in anything since . . . noth 
ing comes up to those verses of ours that are 
gone forever. 

We had a large wooden box under our desk 
that would hold, we should say, between two 
and three bushels of poetry. When we finished 
a poem we dropped it into the box. For three 
long golden years we threw poems into that 

n\ 



Prefaces 



box, stamping them down from time to time, 
and there must have been a thousand poems 
there ... all about love and the old gods and 
the red morning of the world and the sudden 
ghosts that go whizzing through the moon- 
light. It was our intention when the box got 
so full that we could not trample another poem 
into it to dig them all out, choose a couple of 
hundred of the best ones, publish them, and in- 
stantly become famous. So, being absolutely 
sure that these were wonderful poems, we 
bided our time ... we wrote, we gloated over 
them, we held them back from print, we 
dreamed of immortality and we bided our 
ti-me. How we would sit and look at that box 
and worship those poems ! 

The newspaper which employed us employed 
also a negro janitor named Henry, a genial 
savage with the scars of razor slashings all 
over his neck and face, and a- genuine taste for 
Shakespearian rhetoric, who well understood 
that the box beneath our desk contained works 
of art and not waste paper. Henry had once 
worked in some theater In Memphis; he had 
272 



Preface to an Unpublished Volume 

soaked in hundreds of lines of Shakespeare, 
which he would deliver for us on very slender 
encouragement. And he understood them, too 
. . . especially well did he understand lines that 
promised bloodshed or lines that were heavy 
with odor, or gaudily colored. For a dime he 
would opine that the poems in the box under 
our desk were likely as good as Shakespeare; 
for a quarter they were probably better. And 
this was evidence of a kindly nature in Henry, 
as we never read any of the poems to him. 
That would have been beneath our dignity. 
We were dignified, then; we cultivated dignity 
consciously — for were we not about to appear 
before the world as a poet? We practiced the 
mental gesture, and secretly we rehearsed a 
number of physical poses as well. We went 
so far as to wonder whether to. have our pic- 
ture taken with some kind of a shawl-damn- 
thing about our shoulders . . . 

You see, we believed in those poems in that 
box. There were a thousand of them . . .' 
all about love and starlight and young gods ram- 
paging across the young umbrageous worlds. 
273 



Prefaces 



And Spring. Those poems ! Nobody will ever 
read them, now. Henry came nearer to hear- 
ing them than any one else . . . perhaps Hen- 
ry used to sneak in at night and read them. 
But we will never get any of them back by 
combing Henry's memory. For Henry, by this 
time, must have been lynched or legally hanged 
or finally and fatally razored at some convict's 
coming-out party. Henry was what is known 
in some parts of the South as a "bad nigger"; 
he had the soul of an artist, but he was not a 
peaceful citizen; he should have lived in Renais- 
sance times as the body servant of Benvenuto 
Cellini. 

Henry knew those were poems, and not 
waste paper, in that box. But Henry quit, or 
was fired, one Saturday night, unbeknown to 
us, and a negro named George took his place. 
A new janitor sweeps clean. Before we ever 
heard of George, before we had an opportu- 
nity to lead him to that box of poetry and bump 
his Guinea skull against it and impress him 
with its sacred character, George had carried 
it away. . . . He thought it was waste paper. 
^74 



Preface to an Unpublished Volurrw 

It was our future ... it is our past . . . 
it was what we were born to create and we have 
never done anything since — oh! well, if you 
coax us, a thing or two. But nothing like Those 
Poems. Few have — by Heaven! we swear it! 
There were only two things that could have 
happened to those poems: either they should 
have been published, and we should have died 
of consumption on their publication, or . . . 
or, what happened. The poems perished. We 
live — if you choose to call it life, this existence 
since, knowing that we wrote those poems and 
knowing that we will never agam write any- 
thing like them. For us to have lived on after 
the poems died, dwindling from year to year, 
is the more tragic, because there is about the 
whole thing an element of the comic, too. And 
how pathetic that we should have become suf- 
ficiently reconciled to the comedy so that we 
can actually discuss it! We have never really 
given a good-goddam for anybody's poetry 
since, not even our own. It put a crimp into 
us. To have been a Milton — not mute and 
inglorious, but vocal and glorious — at least a 
275 



Prefaces 



beginning Milton — and then to become a 
column conductor I To be finished by a Guinea 
negro named George with a skull like a piece 
of granite — a gargoyle leaping up to butt the 
viscera out of a seraph ! For those were good 
poems . . . they were all about love and what 
the graves say to one another at midnight and 
about the waters before the face of God was on 
the waters. 

All the waste paper in that place was custom- 
arily taken to the basement and tied Into im- 
mense bales and shipped back to the paper 
mills. We gutted a dozen of those bales, han- 
dling every scrap ourself , but we never found as 
much as one slender little blonde-haired sonnet. 

Well . . . well ... It is something to look 
back on! It Is something to brag about! We 
all need that as we grow older. When most 
people boast about what they did or were fif- 
teen years ago, a fact is likely to pop up and 
confute them — but we shall go on believing In 
those poems and sighing over them and Idoliz- 
ing them and not a soul on earth can spring 
276 



Preface to an Unpublished Volume 

one of them on us and prove how rotten they 
were — that is, unless Henry read them and Is 
not yet hanged. Heard melodies, as Keats 
says, are sweet, but those unheard . . . 



31J-77-9 



